There remains an idealized conception of suburban Central America that is all too familiar: a whitewashed picket fence circumscribes a carefully manicured lawn. The children, usually three, play at home. The father, dressed in his weekend gingham, customizes his sports car (it is often cherry red and certainly American – a Chevy or a Ford). The mother watches her husband and children from the kitchen window, laboring over baked goods with a smile on her lips as red as the hood of her husband’s car. These are the perennial images made popular by movies, TV shows, and politicians that are reminiscent of a bygone America. These pastoral images are rooted in the period before and after the Great Depression (1929-1939), accompanied by narratives including first kisses, first car journeys and picnics. It is precisely the American ideal that the excellent collective exhibition of Carriage Trade, Model house (New York), after the Death’s Journey from Wisconsin disputes.
The exhibit is a living archive of American calamity over the past 150 years. It examines images and narratives of localized crises in diverse locations, from suburban Wisconsin to metropolitan Manhattan. Issues include gun violence, racial violence and the exploitation of immigrant workers. Altogether, the show not only shatters clichés, but also presents America as a country long scarred by natural disasters, class antagonism, and racial violence. The exhibition is anchored in the book Death’s Journey to Wisconsin (1973), in which American photo-anthropologist Michael Lesy arranged prosaic photographs by Charles Van Schaik documenting the countless crises of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, during the 19th century.
November 22, 1963 by John Schabel (1963–2023), an enlarged childhood calligraphy exercise written by the artist on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, introduces the exhibit. The pigmented ink is fitted with stick drawings of the infamous Dealey Plaza motorcade. This event prompted many Americans to begin to question both the abstractions of the American dream and the putative narratives being rolled out by the media to make sense of the calamity.
Sihan Cui’s photographic and video works examine the stories of local Chinese immigrants in New York. “After 365 Days 1” (2019) shows the family of Yang Song, a Chinese sex worker who died following a 2019 police raid on a massage parlor in Flushing, New York, protesting the story of the police. The video tells recent Chinese immigrants’ stories of harrowing isolation and grueling working conditions, complemented by a reprint of activist photojournalist Corky Lee’s documentation of a 1975 protest in Chinatown.
In the following rooms we see panels of photographs and text excerpts that juxtapose fragmented stories of Death’s Journey to Wisconsin with Van Schaick’s photographs of anonymous models. Scott’s curation interrogates the inveterate ways of the 24-hour news cycle of distilling tragedy into mere packets of fleeting information. The enduring nature of the dehumanization of our media ecosystem is evidenced by the works of Paul Auster/Spencer Ostrander and Mona Leau, which archive the current bloodshed and reductionist apparatus of “the red state versus the blue state “.
Far too often, galleries in Chinatown are disconnected from the issues of the working-class community in their neighborhood. The galleries and the people of Chinatown occupy two distinct worlds. Carriage Trade deftly challenged this by moving away from radical abstractions through the likes of the aforementioned idealized American idiom. The gallery also avoids favoring the urban or the rural, a guarantee of its globality. This is an impressive and poignant exhibition that sensitively deals with issues that disinterest a myriad of galleries.
Model house (New York), after the Death’s Journey from Wisconsin will be presented at Carriage Trade (277 Grand Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) until May 21. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
