Abstracting the Everyday
Installation view, Kianja Strobert, Pennies from Heaven, courtesy of Marinaro, New York.
Kianja Strobert’s work might be more at home on a grassy knoll than on the third floor of a building on Broadway. In Pennies from Heaven, on view at Marinaro, Strobert asks us how we interpret our environment when what we expect is at odds with what is. The installation fills the gallery’s white space with pewter park benches. There is a dissonance in finding these icons of public space hidden from view, accessible only by request of a buzzer system. The scene is unexpected—without sitters, the bustle of passersby, the effects of the great outdoors, viewers are confronted with stillness. Strobert builds tension into the seemingly ordinary. Juxtapositions between stillness and movement, public and private, mundane and mysterious ground viewers in the scene created for us.
Haphazardly left along the benches are the simulacrum of the serendipitous encounters that shape our environments. Items that might otherwise be deemed detritus reveal themselves to be small treasures. Like pennies picked up off the street, we have the ability to imbue even the simplest items with sentiment. In Untitled #1 (2022), a photograph, a magazine clipping, and a votive candle are among the items strewn across the seat, becoming slowly absorbed by the pewter paint that coats and defines the space. In Untitled #7 (2025), we find postcards and a bungee cord, and in Untitled #5 (2025), a folded sweatshirt. According to the exhibition materials, Strobert intentionally selected common items to invite interpretation and conversation, and these objects serve as a spiritual guide, leading viewers to reflect on the artifacts themselves, but also our own associations we bring to these encounters.
Kianja Strobert, Untitled #1, 2022, wood, plastic, lathe, paper mâché, paper, ink, wax, glass, acrylic paint, wire, 45 x 96.5 x 26 inches (81.3 x 245.1 x 66 cm), courtesy of Marinaro, New York.
Mixed amongst the relics of the everyday are less familiar items left by Strobert. The stacked structures of Strobert’s Noise/Disaster series appear like forgotten Jenga towers, while what Strobert calls “folded forms” hang from the walls and benches. More tensions arise in the interplay of supple and solid, identifiable and abstract. In some ways, the space feels defined by its precarity. Would the removal of a single object disrupt the delicate balance, sending the whole scene towards collapse?
Tucked behind a wall dividing the space is the culmination of Strobert’s tableau. To the left, an array of folded forms dangle, as if strung up on a clothesline. Folded Form #5 (2025), with rust and purple stripes, is folded in half horizontally and then forward on itself. Folded Form #15 (2025) chrome and twice the size of the others, creased just along the edge. Folded Form #2 (2025), is a dainty white wisp with a blue stripe, blue and red dots, and an ominous stain, extending towards viewers as if caught mid-gust. Playing with textures, shapes, patterns, colors, no two pieces are alike. The stillness from the room before carries into the next, its quiet eerieness . The structure of each fragment seems the consequence of an incidental freeze frame leaving the whole room at a standstill. At any moment, the breeze could start again, rippling the folds of each work. The disruption that felt daunting in the previous room now feels inevitable—even welcome. But stuck at the precipice of movement, viewers are left waiting for a wave that never breaks.
Kianja Strobert, Folded Form #12, 2025, paper mâché, metal lathe, wire, varnish, acrylic paint, watercolor, tablet, power cord, 48 x 17 x 10 inches (121.9 x 43.2 x 25.4 cm), courtesy of Marinaro, New York.
To the right, Folded Form #12 (2025) peels open to reveal a tablet playing a video in which a man dances gawkishly as pennies rain from above in a literal manifestation of the exhibition’s title. The footage, feauring Vernel Bagneris, is taken from Herbert Ross’s 1981 film “Pennies from Heaven.” If Strobert were to include sound, one would find that Bagneris is dancing to Bing Crosby’s song “Pennies from Heaven” from Norman McLeod’s 1936 film of the same name. A titular matryoshka doll, viewers are left to draw their own conclusions. The windfall might be wealth, but we don’t pick pennies up off the street for their monetary value.
Installation view, Kianja Strobert, Pennies from Heaven, courtesy of Marinaro, New York.
Pennies from Heaven is on view at Marinaro from February 27 to April 5, 2025.
