New Uncanny’s Haunting Reveries
Installation view of COMFORT ZONE. Work by Craig Jun Li and Khanh Le Le. Photo by Liam Murray. Courtesy of New Uncanny Gallery.
Right before heading to West Harlem on an overcast, rainy Tuesday afternoon, I asked Danish artist Anna Sofie Jespersen how she wants the viewer to feel when encountering her work, and she responded: “Anything. I don't care what it is; any reaction is a good reaction, but ideally it’d be both visceral and psychological.” I seem to have understood what she meant after visiting New Uncanny. As its name suggests, the gallery offers a fever-dream-like experience that staunchly refuses to insulate artworks in a pristine, immaculate bubble.
An unassuming door under the bridge on 136th opens. Immediately to the right, a big warning sign that reads “No Entry” blocks off access to the rest of the ground floor. After ascending two flights of eerily lit stairs, New Uncanny emerges awaiting—an unheated ’60s office space connected to a dark warehouse. “I think it used to be a rug-cleaning factory but was abandoned long ago. The landlord rented it out to movie productions and filming sets. We found a fake-looking incarceration record in one of the drawers. No one really knows much about the property,” says curator Dasha Aksenova, who co-founded the gallery along with Dahlia Bloomstone and Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov. “There is no way this place isn’t haunted,” I think to myself.
Installation view of an image of your labor hovers over me. Work by Gunner Dongieux. Photo by Christian Amaya Garcia, courtesy of the artist and New Uncanny Gallery.
In the front room, the four-person show, an image of your labor hovers over me, embodies a muted sense of dissonance, musing on the process, imprint, and surveillance of labor and value generation. Gunner Dongieux’s paintings, for instance, are serially numbered and labeled, with tags such as “MATERIALS,” “DECONSTRUCTED ARCHETYPE,” and “LIVE STREAM MONETIZATION SCHEME.” Imageries imbued with popular and digital appeal adapt to the surrounding space—iconoclastic and somewhat dystopian with vertical orange, yellow, and blue stripes. Leading up to the show’s opening, the artist had utilized the space as a temporary studio, streaming each work session through Twitch. Considering commissions, online distribution, and the aestheticization of the creative process, Dongieux’s practice questions commodification and cultural relevance. Irreverent, humorous, and sometimes cartoonish, his work seems to nuance and reconcile with expectations of intellectualization, mass appeal, and stylistic continuity within one’s art career.
Installation view of an image of your labor hovers over me. Photo by Dominic Palarchio, courtesy of New Uncanny Gallery.
Adriana Furlong, Christian Amaya Garcia, and Dominic Palarchio display their work amid and on top of metal office desks and file cabinets. Through undulating architectural motifs, a paint roller in a bucket, documentations of sculpture-making, and prints of soiled mechanic rags, the artists render “completeness” dubious and instill a work-in-progress quality to the space, plotting labor into an archaeological configuration. Walking around the room, I constantly find myself asking, “Is this an artwork or part of the original building?” Truly, it’s difficult to tell. It’s like that widely circulated reel taken at the Guggenheim Museum, in which someone took off a shoe and placed it on the floor as a prank. Other unsuspecting visitors started taking pictures of the shoe, thinking it was among the artworks on display. At an image of your labor hovers over me, the viewer’s constant effort to make out the threshold between art and everyday objects fosters a uniquely interactive experience—one that rejects the didactic and dialogues with the viewer’s inner skeptic.
Miriam Simun, A Wet Chemical Trace, 2017. Glass, clay, silicone, magnets, laboratory clamps, electric cord, Schizachyrium scoparium, grow light, humidifier, water vapor, custom scent Our Day Will Come. Dimensions variable. Photo by Liam Murray. Courtesy of New Uncanny Gallery.
In the main warehouse/factory space, the group exhibition Comfort Zones is ambitious, chilling, and best viewed when alone. Featuring mostly installations, the show almost segments the eerie space into multisensory experiential cubicles that aim to disrupt the harboring of anxiety. Miriam Simun’s A Wet Chemical Trace (2017), for instance, wraps around stacks of wooden storage shelves. Silicone tubes quietly permeate the space with vapor that carries the intricately engineered scent of an endangered flower, Agalinis acuta (sandplain gerardia), whose natural scent is imperceptible to the human nose. Developed by the artist and chemists from International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., this synthetically reproduced scent accompanies a dimly lit pot of Schizachyrium scoparium (little bluestem), inverting an otherwise parasitic relationship. An arena alchemic and sterile, the work poetically constructs a dystopia—one born out of deprivation and salvaged by data sets and artificial solutions.
Installation view of COMFORT ZONE. Work by Vadim Pugin (front) and Diane Severin Nguyen (back). Photo by Liam Murray. Courtesy of New Uncanny Gallery.
Yet, the show’s effort to provide the viewer with comfort and assurance in a commonsensically creepy space proves futile. While in Sasha Fishman and Miles Scharff’s Drinking Pennies at Midnight (2024), mass media clips created by TikTok spiritual gurus may offer temporary distraction and even amusement, Vadim Pugin’s sprawling installation right across the room warns of the perils of big data and uncontainable information. Khanh Le Le’s stack of deadstock fabric and Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov’s masked half-figures find themselves in a mummified state—lifeless but unable to go through with their own vanishing. Diane Severin Nguyen’s gift bags turn away from celebration, while Alex Shchurenkov’s glory hole sculpture struggles with pleasure and privacy. Around every shadowy corner, horror lingers, but in a refreshingly exhilarating way.
Installation view of COMFORT ZONE. Work by Amadeo Morelos. Photo by Liam Murray. Courtesy of New Uncanny Gallery.
As my gaze gently caresses every haphazard wire and every stain on the aged, dusty window sills, I traverse the space as I would an escape room. At New Uncanny’s soon-to-close West Harlem location, these two finale shows are rife with a post-apocalyptic, having-been-left-behind sensibility, enticing the viewer to indulge in a thrilling and unnerving retreat, from which they walk away feeling sober, alert, and more alive than ever.
COMFORT ZONES is curated by Dasha Aksenova, featuring Dahlia Bloomstone, Ilya Fedotov-Fedorov, Cal Fish, Sasha Fishman, Khanh Le Le, Miles Scharff, Diane Severin Nguyen, Miriam Simun, Craig Jun Li, Amadeo Morelos, Vadim Pugin, Alex Shchurenkov, and Dexter Vandersall.
an image of your labor hovers over me is curated by Qingyuan Deng, featuring Gunner Dongieux, Adriana Furlong, Christian Amaya Garcia, and Dominic Palarchio. Both exhibitions are on view at New Uncanny Gallery, 2334 12th Ave, New York through December 20, 2024.
