The previous inhabitants of the space were two brothers who had grown up there. As adults, they altered the space to accommodate their Gen X gamer/otaku tendencies, including a disdain for natural light. One of them had two young daughters who lived there, too. In every room, you would find multiple computer screens, anime figurines, decorative swords, and drones. One of the rooms was even decorated like a sort of dungeon. But what really made us curate a show in this space, if only in an attempt to preserve its memory, was the room covered in the daughters’ drawings. These two girls, who were also gamers, had spent all these years practicing drawing on their bedroom walls, piled on top of one another. It’s staggering, sweet, and a little dark in places.
It’s not always easy to find spaces in New York that have any sort of personality. There’s such a proliferation of overpriced, cheaply refurbished Airbnb apartments with gray floors. (Same with white cubes.) So when an apartment that has a story to tell comes along, it needs to be cherished in some way. That’s what drove us to make a show here, to share this excitement with artists who could appreciate the space as much as we do.
“Elegant-obscene” tracks. All in all the installation itself is pretty clean and conventional, even if the space is not. Maybe that keeps them from conflicting. It was important to us to let the space sing. Aspects like the wall drawings, or the radiator whose base was sloppily cast in concrete, or the decades’ worth of smudges around lightswitches – they aren’t ‘works’ on the checklist but very much protagonists in the show. When we started to think of artists to invite, it seemed that the space offered up two poles: the daughters’ art, and the puerile, arrested-developmental aspects of adult gamer culture (Marvel movies, collectible figurines, tricked-out PC towers). We were thinking about what bridges the two, and of artist friends who could play on that.
The room in which Hito’s piece is being shown was previously the dad’s “man cave,” with his collection of swords, which shared a wall with the daughters’ room filled with pink computers and girly, round, fluffy toys. In its own ambivalent way, Lovely Andrea examines the sunk costs of fantasy and escapism in media, and it finds surprising moments when reality and history pierce the phantasm. All these different extremes are balancing each other in the exhibition.
Even though the apartment is eccentric and bizarre looking, there’s something very peaceful about it. For Amalia, it reminded her of her home growing up, which was in a similar state of disrepair and also painted in bright colors (yellow, purple, fuchsia) to fit her dad’s Gen-X taste. Hopefully that familiarity comes across – affection more than objectification.
There are moments where the ‘apartment’ and the ‘art’ blur and that’s a good thing. Whitney’s lighter-tag on the ceiling of the kitchen and SoiL’s spray paint piece are examples of that. Some visitors are unclear if they are ‘art’ or ‘from before.’ Conversely, there are artworks in the show by people who don’t always present as professionalized artists. Olivia Vigo’s lamps come more from the design world, and Emily Hanson has a sensibility that tends to express itself more online and in personal style than in a legible ‘studio practice.’ Mitchell Algus is known as a gallerist, but he makes art on his own time with barely anyone knowing it. Ditto the children’s drawings. Artistic gestures can have a soft touch and they can come from anyone.
Off-site shows such as these tend to turn on that kind of ambiguity. Maybe they are fun because they lean into context which, as we all know, the white cube artificially suspends. An artwork is lucky if it ends up in a “homey” context, rather than packed away in a storage unit. It makes some sense, then, to work with what these things might be like as cohabitants, instead of floating in a void.
A number of visitors have taken the show as an opportunity to vent about a feeling of boredom and stagnancy with art right now, at least in New York – that there is a sense of sameness and safety in galleries, driven in part by fear of the downturning market. A decade ago, there were a lot more projects in odd spaces like this, in New York and elsewhere. Maybe they help keep things feeling special, or worth doing.
We invited artists who we thought would have some resonance with the apartment and the traces of Gamer Dad and/or his daughters. Maggie is a good example of how we went about it. She came to the apartment to do a site visit. She decided she wanted to do something in the hallway, because the peeling purple paint reminded her of a punk house in Jersey that she went to as a kid, where her older sister’s band practiced. At that house they had a communal shelf of stolen and scrounged nail polishes. She wanted to reconstruct that memory in some way, so that’s what we did. She had the good instinct to place the shelf over a particularly jagged section of peeling paint, which makes it a bit dramatic.
On a workaday level we mostly invited friends who we knew would be around in the summer, with a couple exceptions of friends who live elsewhere. Sticking around New York for the summer is funny because it gets so quiet, while at the same time your feeds blow up with travel content from abroad. There can be a nice camaraderie among the stay-behinds, and that was on our minds.
Some visitors have thought this was the debut of a new, ongoing apartment gallery, but that’s not the case. This is a one-off project in this space. Both of us (Amalia as an artist and filmmaker, Nick as a curator) prefer to undertake projects when special circumstances line up and it genuinely makes sense to do something. We will continue to collaborate, but the result might take a different shape altogether. Making shows in order to fill a slot or maintain a regular rate of output is part of why it sometimes feels like art is just going through the motions right now.
Amalia Ulman (b. 1989) is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Born in Argentina but raised in Spain, she studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins in London. Her works, which are primarily voiced in the first person, blur the distinction between the artist and object of study, often creating humorous, gentle deceptions, while exploring class imitation and the relationship between consumerism and identity. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Jenny’s’ at Jenny’s, New York, 2023, ‘Role Play’, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2022 and ‘Sordid Scandal’, Tate Modern, London, 2020. Her first feature film El Planeta premiered in 2021 at Sundance Film Festival and opened the NF/ND series at MoMA at Lincoln Center. Her sophomore film, Magic Farm, will premiere in 2025.
Nick Irvin (b. 1990) is a curator and writer based in New York and Princeton, New Jersey. He organizes Song Cycle, an occasional, itinerant exhibition and publication series. Other recent curatorial projects include “Dowsing” at Emanuel Layr, Vienna, 2023; and “I think of a mustard seed as a battery. From Gentle Wind Project to I Ching Systems, 1983-2022”, Theta, New York, 2023. His writings can be found in May Revue, Frieze, Art in America, BOMB and elsewhere.
