As promised (threatened?) at the conclusion of the first installment of gallery-hopping conversations, ever-dedicated cofounder Emily Colucci and Swanson Kuball gallerist Laura Swanson braved the frigid cold and icy winter winds to wander the mercifully shorter blocks of Tribeca to discover what the hell was going on down there. Come along as we reflect on the good, the bad, the pretentious, the frightening, and the unmemorable:

Emily: “I feel like I’m going to be murdered” was the text I sent you from 15 Orient while waiting for your Uber to arrive for our Tribeca winter stroll. After banging open a heavy metal door in an alley, greeting who I’m going to assume was the landlord’s teen son on after-school security duty, I marched up the many stairs to arrive at the third floor, walking through a door that was just propped open. There, I found a wide-open, old-school Tribeca loft that looked like it had seen better days with a few shattered windows and creaky floorboards. Other than the gallery workers chattering in a back office, there were no other signs of life. Deshaun Price’s show consisted of nine works scattered through that ginormous space, mostly canvases with sketchy undercooked renderings of women. These hung on great expanses of walls, one or two to a room as if those were the only load-bearing walls in the place! And with all the crackling, splotchy water damage, I believe it! 15 Orient’s space is so much more remarkable than the artwork itself, spooky and sprawling with great gaps in the floorboards. Some rooms didn’t have any lights on at all–hence my fear of potential homicide. Was I lured here for nefarious reasons? The pervasive stench of secondhand cigarette smoke also added to the film noir mood.

In the days after our Tribeca trip, I keep thinking about the missed opportunity to do something interesting with that space rather than some staid ladies on canvases. A gallery around the corner could provide inspiration. The Caretaker, the composer of ambient dementia deterioration, contributed a soundscape to Ivan Seal’s distorted flowers and memento mori skulls at the Hole. Imagine a show at 15 Orient that is just a dissonant droning sound work in that creepy-as-fuck space, something like David Lynch and Dean Hurley’s The Air Is on Fire with random clips of high-heels puncturing the heavy atmosphere. You also had a particularly apt cinematic comparison…

Laura: The baby crawling across the ceiling in the heroin den in Trainspotting? Yes. But even before 15 Orient, the alley entrance reminded me of Inland Empire when Laura Dern goes through the “Axxon-N” studio door, which acts as a portal to a different reality. This is pretty much exactly what happened to us. When I saw how bewildered the landlord’s teen son looked–blinking behind his glasses and mouth agape after I gave him a little salute–as we headed towards the gallery, I was curious to see if our alley excursion could get even stranger and I was pleased to find out that it did!

I want to note that we saw shows when it was dark outside, which makes the gallery viewing experience so different. At night, these Tribeca loft spaces, with their giant ceilings and windows, lose the ethereal quality of sunlight and present work in more of a dramatic and sometimes unsettling way. At 15 Orient, the dark and empty rooms, the cigarette smoke, the LED lights casting a cold glow, and the extensive restraint in both Deshaun Price’s paintings and curation caught me off-guard. The maze of rooms made me confused about which ones I had already been in. My first reaction upon leaving was to declare that I was never going back to that gallery. I was trying to be a tough guy, but I was actually frightened and intrigued by the experience. Of everything we saw in Tribeca, I can’t stop thinking about 15 Orient. It took a couple of days for it to grow on me and appreciate its beauty. I actually have no notes, I think Price’s work goes perfectly with the space. His pale figures perform as ghosts haunting the gallery. While there is a clear favorite when it comes to the best artwork we saw in Tribeca, going to 15 Orient was one of the most interesting art experiences I’ve had this year. It’s good to feel disturbed, so I look forward to returning. I’m now a fan, thanks to my friend Ezra who suggested we visit.

Emily: You know, your description of Price’s works as haunting that space makes me reconsider my dismissal of the show. See, my opinions can be changed! It might also be that “You could have done this better” was my assessment for Tribeca overall. Before getting into the gripes, though, let’s start with the positive. My favorite–and the main motivation for our Tribeca trek—was undoubtedly Jerome Caja’s Ugly Pageant at Bortolami. Ok, one gripe before the good: To get to Caja’s beatific filth heaven upstairs, Bortolami made you suffer through a true “ugly pageant” downstairs, Caitlin Keogh’s Procession, which I’d put as the worst on our seasonally appropriate naughty list. Her doodly paintings looked like a child’s Christmas disappointment as if Santa stuffed a coloring book of random imagery–outlines of a long-nosed, bird-like plague doctor, a woman sporting boxing gloves, two prim royal ladies–into their stocking. If that wasn’t bad enough, it seemed like someone already colored some of it in, as well as plopped on a few head-scratcher green faces. Worse than a lump of coal, if you ask me. As we stood before them, I said something like “These are awful” or “I hate this.” Not only did Bortolami devote their larger ground floor gallery to Keogh’s busy paintings but they hung way too many, way too close together on a singular back wall. One was more than enough! 

Getting back to positivity and light, marshmallows and candy canes, Caja’s show felt revelatory. I was mainly familiar with his work from paging through Visual AIDS’ online archive years ago, but I had only seen a small selection of his work in a couple of museum shows, Art AIDS America and Art After Stonewall. I assume his work is more widely known at least among a certain subset of the queer art community in San Francisco where Caja lived and worked as a drag queen for many years before his death in 1995 due to complications with AIDS. Caja’s lanky gender-fucking figures, who all resemble drag queens, remind me of Greer Lankton, even though they mostly worked in different mediums. This was the biggest solo show of his work in NYC and it gave me an entirely new perspective. While I always appreciated his drag trash materiality–sparkly nail polish and eyeliner–and other humble materials like white-out, I never quite realized how goddamn funny Caja was! A glamorous turd Virgin Mary, a woman scrubbing herself down while standing in a toilet, another woman sneering while the Virgin Mary rises from her Bloody Mary. With so many uber-serious shows around town, especially in Tribeca, it was a welcome relief to find work that had an actual sense of humor.

Not only were Caja’s subjects amusing and often shocking, a tiptoeing Catholic-born tightwire act between reverence and sacrilege, but I was also enamored with his frames. Most were obviously thrift store-sourced gaudy garbage, which I’m happy Bortolami didn’t think to reframe to please some tasteless collectors. While I enjoyed the plastic-y faux-opulent frames, the best, of course, was the pluffy and torn child’s toilet seat. All art should be framed by a toilet seat, don’t you think?

Laura: Best show we saw. Maybe even the best this year. Galleries, more shows like this, please! Every decision Caja made was so smart. The titles, the frames, the materials. His mixture of high and low seems effortless. Their small scale and his use of cosmetics as a medium make me feel a sense of urgency, the need to make work at all times. I love how they are all quite formal, yet he refuses to over-exalt the work in hilarious ways. I can imagine Caja laughing to himself when he titled Sunny Side Up Talking About Going Over Easy, to a Hard-Boiled Crowd (1991), which depicts a scantily clad lady egg doing a stand-up routine in front of a red curtain to an audience of eggs, painted with nail polish on a sliver of scrap wood and presented on a bed of red velvet with an ornate wood frame. There are so many layers of creative genius here. Since the show, I haven’t been able to stop looking at images of his work online. I found a sculpture of Caja’s called Virgin Bozo (1985-1996), which is a found Virgin Mary statuette with a painted clown face and it’s absolutely incredible. I’ve been telling friends they must see Ugly Pageant before it closes because it’s so inspiring. You can do a lot with a little, especially if you have a good imagination and an open mind. Such an important and rare show. 

Emily: After Caja, what was your second favorite show? Mine was Pippa Garner at Matthew Brown based on that nasty pube cube, Pubic’s Cube (1982/83/2024), alone. I was a little disappointed when I read the checklist and confirmed that those pubes were fake. If they were real, I would have wanted to race out of there. That’s the kind of art terrorism I crave! Even so, I liked Garner’s car-obsessed pencil drawings, particularly the ones looking back to the golden age of 2000s tabloid sleaze with the iconic photo of Lindsay Lohan, before her recent face replacement, drooling in a hoodie. Garner gave LiLo a security upgrade with a “Subcutaneous Airbag,” crammed into her forehead, which “keeps drivers safe regardless of vehicle.” I also appreciated creative inventions like “Tongue-Texting,” putting an iPhone in a harmonica holder for those rabid texters who can’t pause a second for safe travels, and a couple of loose cigarettes used as an ingenious solution for a wonky glove compartment. There’s a dash of Mad Magazine to these drawings, alongside her clear equating of the human body with cars. I also loved the simple photograph of a creepy molester van with a spray-painted “SUCK” emblazoned on the sides. If I could buy any work, that would be my choice. So low class! So American! Besides the pubes and the suit sporting a lampshade like a businessman getting a little too hammered at a company party, Garner’s sculptural work left me a little cold though. 

Laura: I’m a total sucker for artwork that is illuminated and has to be plugged in to function. I also love it when inanimate objects become anthropomorphized. So I gravitated towards Pippa Garner’s sculpture, blinking behind my glasses and mouth agape. Like with Caja, it was refreshing to see work that doesn’t take itself too seriously while retaining attractive formal qualities. But unlike Caja, the humor here relies too much on puns, which might be the lowest form of comedy for me. Still, there was something compelling about the small boarded-up TV just hanging out on the floor. I wondered if it was supposed to be a response to Nam June Paik’s use of televisions. It was cute and sad. It also had this eerie 80s horror movie vibe to it, while also recalling the Little Rascals. It’s a creepy and adorable piece that managed to go past its pun and is probably my favorite in the show. 

Before I forget, I want to mention how friendly most gallery staff are in Tribeca. Everyone we encountered at Matthew Brown, Bortolami, and Ortuzar were especially delightful. You suggested it had something to do with the fact the bosses were in Miami, but still, receiving a friendly hello from staff is much better than not being greeted at all. At 52 Walker, gallery assistants are stationed at a far distance behind a big desk, like they work at a bank, and don’t appear to look up at visitors when they enter and exit. I know some wealthy patrons do not like to be confronted by staff, but you would think Tribeca galleries could afford to be a little more loose. In my best Michael Kors voice, “Lighten up, it’s just art!”

Emily: The chilly reception from the gallery assistants at 52 Walker mirrored the same alienated feeling I got from Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo. So in a way, it was perfect. I know this will be controversial, but there is something deeply boring to me about images about images. Obsession with reproduction and photography should have been left in the Pictures Generation. We get it! The centerpiece of Cwynar’s show is a new film, which works to explain pretty much all the rest of the imagery in the surrounding galleries. We sat and watched the entire thing so I can’t say the endless scroll and vivid cinematography weren’t captivating, but it came off as so doubly empty and pretentious. I know the film was partially supposed to be about her struggles with insomnia, but that didn’t land with me at all, just a parade of beautifully shot images of New York City, ethnically diverse models posing for the camera (Was Cwynar trying to nip the white woman critique in the bud?), a wooden reproduction of the mega-bucks 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, and a voiceover reciting some art school gobblygook. I was tickled by the appearance of kitschy Precious Moments angel figurines, but she did nothing with them. The best moment in the film, by far, was the appearance of Pamela Anderson, whose career rebirth I’m very invested in, in a photo shoot with the artist. Anderson comes off as annoyed and a bit sad in parts, her perfect Playboy image faltering. There was something vulnerable about this slippage and even slightly foreboding, a woman in trouble, to bring it back to Inland Empire. At the very least, it made me feel something. That’s more than I can say for the rest of the film, which was like a long music video.

Laura: The promo image of Sara Cwynar vamping in her own installation gave me pause as to whether I even wanted to see the show. But since everyone has been falling over backwards to praise Baby Blue Benzo, I was ready to be proven wrong. Well, I wasn’t proven wrong. In fact, the show double-downed on the vanity. The film reminded me of something that would be parodied in Zoolander. The 22-minute runtime consists of the artist and models vamping for the camera throughout its entirety. I lost track of how many times Cwynar made the Blue Steel face. The constant breaking of the fourth wall as an artistic act felt like a first-year film student tactic. When the ice skaters in Marlboro-branded race car jumpsuits showed up, I wanted to let out an audible groan. When the male voiceover said randomly, “I’m an 18th-century doll,” I wanted to burst out laughing. And I haven’t even talked about the installation yet.

The ostentatious effort that was made to appear unpretentious–carpeted raised floorboards, laser copies pinned to the wall, the seemingly random and meaningless imagery in the video–made everything feel too try-hard and a little ridiculous. While there are obvious references to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series, and I was reminded of Thomas Hirschhorn’s early installations as well, the show doesn’t go far enough to immerse the viewer in a world. It’s too focused on fashion. Not just because of the models, but the fashion of performing unpretentiousness through the makeshift installation or relentless behind-the-scenes shots in the film. Or performing weirdness like the Marlboro ice skaters (which funnily reminded me of an old SNL clip of Chris Farley attempting to ice skate with Nancy Kerrigan) and installing wall-to-wall carpet in a nauseating shade of blue. But in the end, I’m glad we went because I ran into fellow apartment gallerist Bill Cournoyer and I got to sit down and rest my feetsies while we watched the video. 

Emily: Speaking of pretentious art school, Stuart Middleton’s show at Chapter NY came with a two-sided press release essay. One side was for his gigantic sunflower, raised above our heads, making us dodge wires on the way in. And the other was dedicated to his godawful ugly disemboweled clock canvases, which look like something you’d find someone tinkering away on in the back of a hardware store. Let me quote a bit:

“It is very relaxing to disassemble a clock. You take it from a compact, ticking instrument to a box of loose parts. To disassemble a factory clock feels like resistance, like the luddites taking their hammers, smashing the means of production. It’s called a ‘teardown’ in online jargon. You can watch videos of various things being torn down, mostly consumer electronics; iPhones, kettles. I think it models a desire to tear down bigger, less graspable mechanisms. To have power over them, to see what is inside.

The past touches the future. A touch from outer space. Making ends meet.”

All that writing and it still didn’t make those paintings good. I’m really more annoyed that the gallery allowed the exhibition dissertation than the work itself. 

Laura: This was the worst show for me. The wire installation was a huge waste of space. As for the clock paintings, I remember saying the work would look much better if the canvases weren’t so janky. Anyone gullible enough to shell out money for one of those should at least get a nice and clean presentation. I can’t think of anyone who would want to own one besides mega fans of the Things Organized Neatly Tumblr. However, I did see two visitors excitedly talking about them, so perhaps there is a market for this. Which reminds me of something I witnessed at a student art show as an undergrad at SFAI. One of my peers had presented photographic diptychs of the sidewalks after the holidays. One with a dead Xmas tree, the other showing the same view but with a white outline where the dead tree once was… just like a crime scene! Visitors flocked to the photos, telling the artist how clever it was. I was like WHAT but eventually learned people talk more about art when there’s not much to get because it’s easier to come up with things to say. These disassembled clock paintings are my dead Xmas tree crime scene photos of 2024.

Emily: I like the idea of a Christmas crime scene much more than dissected clocks! On the subject of body horror, an art trend that I’ve become completely sick of is abstract-ish, sculptural, Cronenberg-esque, semi-abject representations of the body. It’s all over every Biennial(e), Triennial, International, and other contemporary art survey shows. While I respect that Jes Fan was one of the main artists pioneering this work, at least in the post-Eva Hesse era, I’m at my limit with this kind of art. I wasn’t even that into the drips of soybean cum goo left in the corners of Andrew Kreps. The best part of that show was the visceral, yucky experience of brushing aside those skin curtains to enter the various exhibition spaces like going into Ed Gein’s nipple-belt lair and turning on a skin lamp. I wonder if the curtains are on sale–could be interesting to hang in a home for a touch of serial killer chic. 

Laura: As I passed through the curtains, I noticed a previous visitor’s hair strand stuck to it and was like oh hell no. By the way, finding random strands of hair from previous guests is the kiss of death if you’re an Airbnb host. If even one review mentions that, you’re toast as a host. Anyone who works a Jes Fan show that has those skin curtains should be on hair strand high alert. But yeah, there wasn’t anything distinctive or new about the work. It felt like an antiquated trend that I thought we were past. Are people still into this? Why? It’s limp and unappealing. Even without the unintentional stuck hair, it wasn’t even that grotesque. It seemed a little too packaged.

Emily: Two shows that certainly didn’t come off as packaged because they had absolutely no cohesion at all were Jiha Moon at Derek Eller and Linda Stark at Ortuzar, both of which seemed like group shows by only one artist. Starting with Moon, I liked the wall-mounted paintings with jammed-on ceramics of old browning banana peels and random vampire teeth more than the sculptural ceramic vessels. The only exception was the one featuring Keanu Reeves. At the very least, these were playful. Same with Stark’s random collection of cat paintings, peppermint paintings, a wall-hung metallic bouffant…It was pleasing on some level but didn’t go beyond that. Like a fun gift shop.

Laura: The shows at Eller and Ortuzar are similar in that they have a girly appeal. I was attracted to Jiha Moon’s painting Blue Haetae (2024) because it tugged at both my Korean and Lisa Frank roots. The work was colorful and playful, but the show was overfilled, much of it wasn’t strong, and I’m not a big fan of drippy, tumorous ceramics. Ortuzar was the opposite in that it’s a much bigger space and gave a lot of it, including dramatic lighting, to each poppy and clean work. This considered display was amusing to me because it made the works feel like very high-end gift shop tchotchkes. Don’t tell me a diptych of red and white striped peppermint candy sculptures with twisted nip nips isn’t something you wouldn’t want to buy at Spencer’s Gifts in the mall. If I had the money, I could see myself buying this as a humorous gift for my sister, who loves bawdy and cute humor. 

Emily: I was instantly drawn to the silvery bouffant as a nod to Hairspray and totally would have bought it from a wacky gift shop like the one at the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore. Finally, the last show we popped in was Luhring Augustine’s Ayiti Toma II: Faith, Family, and Resistance, which by that point my eyes had glazed over almost completely. I pretty much universally liked all the paintings. However, the rusted metal sculpture work looked like you wandered into a scrapyard in New Orleans and the curator devoted an entire half of the gallery to it. Toss it out, give the other paintings some space! 

Laura: I agree. All of the paintings were outstanding, but it was difficult for me to get past the fact that the gallery was crammed with work. A few artists had way too many pieces in the show, which hampered the viewing experience because everyone deserved more breathing room. The most memorable works for me were André Pierre’s portraits of Baron Samedi and Gran Brigitte Lo Croix and Myrlande Constant’s beaded tapestries Marasa 3 (1995), and Ossangnegouéguimalor (After Duval-Carrié) (2006), which were all rich in material, color, darkness, and playfulness. But seeing work lined up so closely, side by side, reminded me I was in a commercial gallery. I often wish there were more pared-down group shows. It’s a more powerful experience when there is a clear vision and editing eye. But I also know sometimes group shows are about community and quantity through the offering of a survey. And I also know we all can’t be Gagosian and that bills must be paid. Maybe I’m the one that needs to lighten up?

Emily: We certainly can’t all be Gagosian…but, what are they even up to? For our next art excursion, maybe we should invest in some enormous fur coats and make the trip up to the tony Upper East Side. Madison Avenue, baby! I can’t afford mink, but I can scrimp my pennies together to see if I can get a raccoon coat from a furrier’s storage closet à la Tim Dillon. 

Laura: Galerie Buchholz, we’re coming for you!