NEW YORK, NY.- This exhibition is the first in a series of shows in a domestic space in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Domestic (1): A Shaggy Dog is a large group show of mostly small and very small works, arranged on shelves alongside books and objects. The installation will take the form of a private conversation between things, between myself and a dear friend and collaborator*, between artists, and with the viewer who will be seeing works in an intimate landscape of sorts, within a private space, and with someone's personal effects. The exhibition has taken shape (as most things do these days) across text chains about what's for dinner, art, books, cocktails, politics and interior design. There have been messages/images sent over Instagram, shared Dropboxes, Google docs, video meetings and some excellent sandwiches. This intimacy, and some slippage between the personal and the professional is part of the whole performance.

Arranged in accordance with aesthetic or personal logic, this exhibition abstracts the concept of the wunderkammer and a human tendency to shelve things that fit into categories like naturalia, artificialia and exotica, but most of the works are less easily categorized, more hybrid, less overt in their source. The painters I was drawn to for this project have a resistance to an over-arching style, where there is some serious friction between the physical marks on a surface and the painted image. Or where the body of works is cogent, yet the painter's system remains illegible. Some abstractions can function as landscapes in the scale-shifting framework of the shelves, and some images become more pictorial, and concentrated.

The sculptures we chose often flirt with utility: are they vessels or objects? Paintings or pans? Others exist between abstraction or figuration, or point toward the ethnographic or botanical. Some feel like models: I keep getting stuck on the phrase dollhouse-scale dilemmas.** Other works use arcane technologies and thus resist clear dating. Memento mori and still-life are embedded in the domestic experience too. I'm thinking about the family photo, the melted candle, crumbs on the counter, the pawprints of deceased family dogs.

This exhibition aspires to a dry humor, but like any New Yorker cartoon, it is also poignant. And while the show thus emulates a private collection, and the idiosyncratic randomness of things like “taste,” it also interrogates how and where value and connections are produced. Is it the books? or a pile of magazines? Is it the coffee, the wine or the conversation? Is it the commitment to making an appointment? Or is that too awkward? Is it an inside joke?

Uri Aran, Lucas Blalock, Peggy Chiang, Jill Goldstein, Max Guy, Kenji Ide, Bill Jenkins, Edward Kay, Em Kettner. Sam Linguist, Charles Mayton, Ryan McLaughlin, Shala Miller, Yu Nishimura, Umico Niwa, Alexandra Noel, Virginia Overton, Eric Palgon, Walter Price, Aurie Ramirez, Bruce M. Sherman, Angus Suttie

*This exhibition was made in collaboration with Steven Eckler
** Rhea Anastas and Robert Snowden, Danny McDonald, June 8 – August 13, 2022, 80WSE