“Shoot for the Stars” at Swanson Kuball Makes Me Wish I Were a Member of the Abelow-Kirilloff Family

A mother who carefully renders her grade school-aged son in detailed gouache, focusing on his tousled brown hair, red shirt, and pointy vampire teeth as if he’s sucking the life out of her. An adult son who makes multiple paintings of a stick figure-like shadow outlined in sickening yellows, coagulated blood reds, and burnt oranges, all a representation of a man on fire, otherwise known as H-man, from his mother’s singular published mystery novel, This Never Happened, a character with whom Mama is still fixated given her H-man-inspired Instagram filled with blazing imagery like a flaming mattress. A grandson who continues this pyro legacy by drawing imaginary villains including Hot Head, a skeleton wrapped in flames, as well as other ominous rogues like Doom Foot, a heavy-lidded hobo half-covering his visible nips with suspenders and no shoes. A sister who dedicates a breathlessly zealous portrait of her cousin—her big teased 1980s black hair and flat-eyed expression like a lost member of Jem and The Holograms surrounded by stars on a vast blue background resembling a wonky European Union flag—a vision that came to her after taking psychedelics.

Even though this collection of misfits, all with their own…ahem…eccentric interests, could be straight out of Pecker, The Royal Tenenbaums, or Twin Peaks, this isn’t a family concocted by the minds of John Waters, Wes Anderson, or David Lynch. This is a very real family of artists, gathered together within one exhibition Shoot for the Stars at Swanson Kuball, an apartment gallery in Long Island City run by Laura Swanson and Greg Kuball. From grandma Paula Brunner Abelow’s contemplative, rosy-cheeked, watercolor self-portrait, completed in 1945, to 9-year-old Lev Lazarus’s (what a name!) white flag with a pop-eyed, bug-like, lime-green spherical alien, declaring, “greeings [sic] earthling,” Shoot for the Stars spans multiple generations of the Abelow-Kirilloff family.

Given the lineage inherent in a show such as this, many family members unsurprisingly appear in each other’s work. Beyond exsanguinated mama Katya Kirilloff’s aforementioned perfectly titled Vampire Boy, representing her son Lazarus, who also responded with his own drawn Dracula clan, Vampire Family, Kirilloff also creates a less blood-thirsty but equally immortalizing trompe-l’œil painting Paula, based on a photograph of Paula Brunner Abelow in Prague in 1992, returning to the city from which her family fled before World War II. While Paula is quite tender, the family portrait centerpiece of the exhibition is a bit more cracked. Entitled Nuclear Family, Tisch Abelow portrays her parents, brother Joshua Abelow, and herself as a chubby child with curly hair and a red dress worthy of Annie, only with Pepto-pink striped sleeves. The members of Nuclear Family all look a tad off-kilter. Mustachioed Daddy’s hair frays like it’s been yanked and his rectangular glasses are askew, mirroring his wonky eyes. Mommy grinds her oversized teeth, her gums only slightly pinker than her flushed ruddy skin, clashing with her pillowy mustard-yellow hair. Josh comes out looking the best though his coy expression belies an inner mischievousness. Positioned in Swanson Kuball’s living room directly across from Paula Brunner Abelow’s much less comic pastel portraits of her sons Ralph and Eugene, as well as a cartoonish line sketch of her husband Ira paging through a book with a bottle of wine, the exhibition comes off as a curated family tree.

The most curious part of Nuclear Family, though, is the family’s location, floating—and slightly fading—into a bland abyss of grey. Where the hell are they? The painting is not far from a framed Sears Portrait Studio snapshot that would be plopped on an office desk; it’s as if the vacuous corporate atmosphere is sucking the family in. Nuclear Family is not the only work that features this flat background void. Tisch Abelow’s adoring Shoot for the Stars also sees a face emerging from a starry blue sky. Kirilloff’s Vampire Boy disappears into nothingness. Lev Lazarus doesn’t bother with backgrounds or even, sometimes, bodies as seen in Two Heads, No Bodies, exposing the disembodied heads of a blue-eyed man in need of a shave and a fresh-faced alien. This gaze into the abyss is just one of the formal and thematic intersections that pop up repeatedly throughout Shoot for the Stars, raising the question if artistic traits are inherited.

Another is a collapsing of the past and the present, sometimes quite literally in works like Kirilloff’s Lev/Gleb, Gleb/Lev. Others project a more difficult-to-pinpoint, out-of-time, nostalgic quality, a feeling I associate with the American suburbs (appropriately Swanson Kuball is located right near the bridge to Roosevelt Island, itself a suburban mindfuck in the middle of the East River). This is best viewed in Joshua Abelow’s series of photographs taken in his (and Tisch and Katya’s) hometown of Frederick, Maryland. An overexposed street sign flashes out of the darkness, indicating an arrival at “Mystery Street” (Paging, David Lynch!). A child in a Yoda mask and a cozy gator costume peers eerily too close to the camera. Perhaps the same child, now pretending to be Spiderman, hops around a front porch, its deck wrapped in Christmas garlands. An Amazon package tipped on its side is the only indication that these snapshots derive from the 2020s. Otherwise, pictures of a Burger King sign floating above a road as seen through a gap in the hedges and a parking lot populated with one beater could come from any decade from the 1980s until now. In fact, many of these photos look a whole lot like my own childhood in suburban Pittsburgh, as well as that same township now. The suburban American landscape, all soulless traffic lights, strip malls, highway exits, and parking lots, never changes. Not really.

But more than their timelessness, something is unsettling about many of Abelow’s photographs. First, it’s hard not to feel a sense of unease when picturing Abelow crouching in a bush by the side of the road trying to get the perfect shot of a fast food joint like a peeper. Many images also feature blobby bursts of dust and glares that remind me of supposed photographic proof of ghosts. In certain photos, too, something small is just off. Take, for instance, Hoke Place, Frederick, MD, which captures a cream-colored house, reminiscent of Jimmy DeSana’s even more stark, black-and-white early photographs of suburban homes. While this image, like DeSana’s, reminds me of a crime scene photo, the detail I can’t stop contemplating is the single blue shutter that clashes with the mauve rest. Who made that sinister design decision?! And why does it make me so uncomfortable? Someone fix it!

From Joshua’s Hoke Place, Frederick, MD hung adjacent to his sister’s Nuclear Family in the living room to Lazarus’s extraterrestrial-planted Flag flapping in the breeze affixed to a chainlink-wrapped metal pole in the backyard, visible only out a window of Kuball’s studio, the exhibition takes up nearly all of the gallerists’ immaculately clean apartment. The hallway is lined with Lazarus’s drawings, facing his mother’s exhausted Self-Portrait, hastily sketched on a brown paper grocery bag. Tisch Abelow’s Shoot for the Stars hangs above Swanson and Kuball’s bed. Even some of Lazarus’s colorful cycloptic clay alien kings, one of which looks to be wearing a diaper, are sneakily squirreled away on a bookshelf above copies of Death on the Installment Plan, American Dreamer, The White Album, and The Idiot. The only room lacking art is the bathroom. A pity.

My preference for toilet curation aside, an intimate apartment gallery is the perfect location for a familial art show. The work is hung like it would in a home, just missing drawings stuck to the fridge with pride from kitschy touristy magnets. Yet, there is an undercurrent of strangeness to this curatorial concept too. Imagine living among art that represents a family not your own as if you manaically took over a house and pretended THEY were your real relatives, a deranged premise that is as equally cinematic as the ones that opened this essay. But, given the Abelow-Kirilloff family’s gloriously weird artistic fascinations, who could blame Swanson and Kuball? I just might move in and join the family too!