From A to T & Back Again: Openings, Part Two

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Artforum editors Theo Belci and Alex Jovanovich assess some of the New York shows inaugurating the fall exhibition season. RATHER THAN WILLINGLY offer myself as cannon fodder to the first volley of New York gallery openings this September, I decided to decamp. A few days before Labor Day, I escaped to the desert for “Sophisticated Boom Boom,” Joseph Geagan and DeSe Escobar’s show at Lomex’s Las Vegas retreat. The dual exhibition paired Geagan’s painted portraits of showgirls and scenesters and Escobar’s overpainted heat transfer runway images of Egyptian-inspired fashion collections printed on calfskin panels, with each of the two artists capturing a different aspect of the city’s special breed of eccentrics. Much like the pink-suit-and wig-wearing locals at the opening, the artists’ subjects—models and malcontents—are self-possessed and chic, bubbly and idiosyncratic. Perhaps primed by these works, I lingered in the carefully managed eternal twilight of the casinos for a dangerous amount of time, before my body gave up, fell ill, and forced me to ship myself back to the East Coast wrapped like an infant in an airline blanket. Back in New York, I met up with fellow Artforum editor Alex Jovanovich at the opening of Maxwell Graham’s inaugural show in its new space, an installation by Michael E. Smith. We arrived to find a hot, dark room, in which blankets of varying opacity blocked natural light from the windows. A single industrial LED strip hung from a beam beneath an obstructed skylight, illuminating a twenty-foot-wide patch of the floor in a pale-blue wash. Unlike Smith’s recent shows of discrete objects and assemblages at Andrew Kreps, this installation offered a fluid and variable viewing experience. When Alex and I arrived in the space, visitors were grouped together near the windows, avoiding the artificial glow to soak in the lingering daylight. Come nightfall, the crowd had almost entirely moved into the shimmer of the LED strip to continue their conversations like moths under a lantern. Stragglers buzzed around the Bluetooth speakers hidden in the corners of the space, standing as close as possible to the humming bass, corralled into small pockets where the sound was perceptible. I exited the gallery to find the World Trade Center memorial Tribute in Light cutting through the downtown skyline in full beam—swarmed, as always, by flocks of disoriented migratory birds that fly in looping circles around the light—and continued under the twin rays to “Baby Mozart’s Kiss,” a solo show of figurative paintings by Kelsey Isaacs at Theta. The paintings on view depict stage sets and commercial backdrops featuring artificial lights, with the most captivating works using crawling babies to populate their scenes. In Cloud Editor 1, 2026, a naked child fumbles atop a pile of photos of a cloudy blue sky, captivated by the multicolored dots of a rotating disco lamp. This faux firmament was first photographed by Isaacs, who then arranged the printed images on her studio floor and rephotographed them beneath an overhanging camera. These photos are then painted in a measured, realistic style, endowing the canvases with a heightened emphasis on the arrestingly flat perspective of the setup; to draw viewers’ attention to the space between objects on a level floor, studio lights in the composition’s corner cast an overwhelming glare over the already glossy floor panels and illuminate the baby’s back. In another work, Cupid, 2026, a baby is shown from the front on the same stage, so severely backlit that the details of their chest and face are hardly discernible. They wrap around a party light placed on the floor in front of them, directing the constellation of disco beams directly between their legs. The ominous lighting undercuts any infantile cuteness in this gesture, Isaacs’s chiaroscuro rendering the doughy infant a sinister, shadowy specter. The next day I headed downtown again to see David Peter Francis’s presentation of two charmingly enigmatic sets of photos and two experimental films by Unglee, a filmmaker, photographer, and writer who has maintained a slippery media presence in his native France for the past five decades. In the 1980s, Unglee photographed his friend and fellow artist Alix Cléo Roubaud and produced a short, slideshow-style film of rapidly cycled colored portraits (Alix, 1981–2024) from the images. After more than a year of regular correspondence and collaboration, Roubaud passed away due to illness, and in the following period Unglee lost his original photos of her; the photographs on display at David Peter Francis are stills recovered following the rediscovery of the super-8 film for Alix in 2024. Separated on the wall and broken down into individual vignettes, these portraits are reminiscent of Victorian aura photos, overlaying a heavy spirit onto their sitter. The same images are reprinted several times in different color tints, as though Unglee felt it necessary to filter the few remaining memories he had documented of Roubaud through alternating moods and washes. I began my Saturday looking for another meditation on time and energy at the newly rebranded Ellie Rines Gallery in TriBeCa (formerly known as 56 Henry). At the opening, Christopher K. Ho’s elaborate installation of candelabras flickered in a cavernous, dark gallery room. Based on the bourgeois excess of Napoleonic-era dinner party culture, the sculptures integrate a litany of re-created modern consumer objects (an Airpods case, a Toblerone box) into their forms, slowly encasing them in wax as the candles drip throughout the show. During my visit, the candles were almost all blown out, and the overhead track lights were turned to full brightness. Whereas the display suggested a consumerist séance at the show’s dimly lit vernissage, in these harsh lighting conditions it seemed more like a showroom, the candleholders registering as static decor. At Ulrik, Tam Ochiai’s solo show includes three bodies of work: shopping bags mounted on stretcher bars like canvases, wispy paintings of candy-colored figures, and vintage ashtrays on custom pedestals. Since the early ’90s, Ochiai has meticulously maintained a set of vintage shopping bags in a wry study on fetishistic materialism (the theme carries down to the clear latex-y vinyl used to seal them off from the surrounding air). Other bags are skillfully produced dupes. One sports a Comme des Garçons logo, painstakingly painted by Ochiai on a nondescript shopper. With these handmade inclusions, a viewer’s inevitably nostalgia-heavy conceptions of legacy brand heritage and recycled ’90s chic are corrupted by contemporary concerns for authenticity. These concerns have only become heightened in the past thirty years, in which consumers regularly buy authentic used shopping bags (without any actual items inside) from luxury brands secondhand on eBay as status symbols. Alongside the bags, Ochiai is exhibiting a collection of custom pedestals bearing vintage ashtrays, collected personally over decades by the artist. The vessels were left uncleaned; the artist invited visitors to smoke in the gallery, leaving piles of ash as evidence of time, conversations, and anxieties shared in the space during the duration of the show. The state of the ashtrays at the opening provided another explanation for why they had been shown without cleaning: No matter how hard one tries to scrub an ashtray, it is impossible to return it to perfect sterility after use. Glass yellows, pewter develops pits, and metal oxidizes, with each stubbed-out cigarette leaving a permanent (yet individually imperceptible) mark on the object’s surface. Ochiai’s installation incorporates energy in the form of socialization, but it manifests as putrid decay. Having started my week alongside my colleague Alex, I resolved to end it with him as well, so I joined him for a Sunday lunch at a red-sauce Italian restaurant in the Bronx. As it turned out, he had also noticed the maudlin overtones I had picked up on in my week of gallery visits. “It seemed like we were all trying to party in the middle of a funeral,” he said. “The offerings weren’t completely terrible. It’s just hard to escape into art when the awfulness of real life keeps butting in.” Mirroring the disparity between the fall gallery season’s outpouring of activity and zeal and Alex’s gloom, the restaurant host, who had been singing cover songs through a karaoke machine on the sidewalk, switched from a seemingly eternal mix of LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” to a somber rendition of “God Bless America.” “This is for this beautiful nation in these tough times,” the host intoned before the crooning began. Theo Belci is a New York-based writer, and assistant editor of Artforum.