Editors’ Selects: May 2025
Xinan Helen Ran: Group Lick
Tutu | 817 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn
April 25 – June 13, 2025
Installation view, Xinan Helen Ran: Group Lick, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Tutu Gallery. Photo by Max C Lee.
Group Lick, Xinan Helen Ran’s second solo exhibition at Tutu Gallery, was brought together by sheer luck. Organic white matter occupies the room’s corners. Used door push bars etched with phrases hang suspended in groups of three. Pictures of memorial dog statues and “desired pathways” annotate the walls. A salt statue of a girl and her dog sits poised on the mantle. All surround a middle mass: a bamboo structure draped in sheer fabric; an animal. Group Lick struck me as a picture of the artist’s life: while object-focused, Ran’s practice also acts as a framework for the way she occupies the world. At Tutu, she does us the pleasure of delicately turning our attention to the gestures of the human experience.
The idea for the show germinated with artificial salt licks, industrial objects used in livestock husbandry to nourish cattle. For such a manufactured object, the salt licks become strikingly organic over time, carved away by soft tongues and hunger. Ran saw this tangible imprint left by the sheep’s tongue as resonant with a human inclination to leave traces on our surroundings. On Tutu’s walls, photos of dog statues—their noses polished gold from continuous petting—and “desired paths” stamped out in rebellion to paved roads confront a subtle poetry caused by the condition of being alive.
In the titular short story from Mu Xin’s collection The Windsor Cemetery Diary (1988), the author tests perception’s limits by flipping a penny on top of a gravestone he frequents. Through rain, seasons, and snow, he always finds the coin flipped back upon his return. This anonymous other, definitively human and capable of the gentle flip of a penny, comes to represent a force working to perceive us. In Ran’s central sculpture I Already Know (2025), we find pennies balancing delicately on bamboo stalks, hand etched with a quote from Mu Xin: “I already know and see that I am known and seen.” Group Lick does not just collect objects that suggest imprints; it is through our voyeurism, in the show and the world, that the imprints give themselves—and us—meaning.
To chip away at the salt lick, to take a step off the path: Ran considers the edges of our human lives. Group Lick is assembled not only by luck, but also through the artist’s strong internal narrative. We are left tracing our fingers over the edges of reality, assured in the power of our licking.
— Victoria Reshetnikov
Laura Lima: Balé Literal
Tanya Bonakdar | 521 W 21st Street, New York
April 24 – May 30, 2025
Installation view, Balé Literal, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, April 24–May 30, 2025. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles
An exhibition, a conversation, a cabaret: Laura Lima’s Balé Literal, on view at Tanya Bonakdar, resists categorization. Visitors to the gallery are greeted by Desenho Giratório #4, a pirouetting assemblage of braided textiles, chains, and ropes. Throughout the gallery, abstract figures composed of fabric and metal fragments mingle with the familiar forms of flags and picture frames among other identifiable entities. Lima’s dancers take shape through motion. Choreographed in homage to Dada poetry, Lima embraces and explores the absurd and encourages visitors to do the same. At any given time, the ensemble is subject to change.
At the time of my visit, Annabelle Serpentine Dance (2025) sways whimsically in one corner, the marionette of an invisible mechanical hand. Across the room, Balerina #1 takes center stage, kicking her tulle legs in a can-can-like fashion. A glance towards the back of the room reveals that this is a pas de deux: a symbiotic duet guided by a production assistant on a spin bike elaborately rigged to give life to Lima’s dancers.
Three windows in the partition give visitors a glimpse backstage, but behind the wall, we find Lima’s troupe in its entirety. Another assistant reels in Balerina #1 (2025), ushering Foice com vestido à grega (2025)—“a sickle cloaked in red cloth”—a white sheet printed with the word “dendroclasts,” and two potted plants into position. I am told that the selection is made at the discretion of the assistants, guided by cues Lima has left regarding the soundtrack and desired ambiance.
In his Dada Manifesto of 1918, Tristan Tzara writes that Dada is “absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity.” Balé Literal is rife with references that direct our attention, but their structure and the story they tell are impromptu. Meaning mutates based on choices. Were Foice com vestido a grega dancing with Martelo com vestido à grega (2025), its hammer counterpart, the allusion would be self-evident. Untethered from the obvious, I think of a line from Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria: “When you dance the dance of another, you make yourself in the image of its creator.” What is Dada if not an act of eschewing? What is dance if not an act of embodiment? What is Balé Literal if not a dialogue between the two?
— Corinne Worthington
Marissa Delano: Depraved Family!!!!!
THIRD BORN | Cozumel 86, Mexico City
April 4 – May 25, 2025
Installation view of Marissa Delano, Depraved Family!!!!!, 2025. Image courtesy of THIRD BORN Gallery. Photo by Asistencia Artística.
In Depraved Family!!!!!, the first solo exhibition of New York-based artist Marissa Delano, childhood homes are presented as closed spaces that offer both safety and concealment. The show brings together two types of works: hand-engraved found mirrors and photographs in custom artist frames. The mirrors, sourced from flea markets in Mexico City, range in shape and size, yet all of them share two features: gold-painted frames and roughly carved, explicit pornographic titles. Every mirror references incest: Pervy Daddy, ¡¡Diversión Familiar‼, Ella chupa la polla de su papá.
Online, pornographic content is often labeled with titles generated or translated by algorithms, frequently resulting in phrases that are strange, disjointed, or grammatically incorrect. These linguistic glitches, far from being trivial, reveal the industrial scale and reach of the pornographic economy: a single video might be consumed across dozens of markets, passed through layers of machine translation, tailored to no one and everyone at once. Delano’s decision to engrave these mistranslated or auto-generated titles on the mirrors draws a direct line between the intimate and the industrial, the personal and the mechanical. In doing so, she highlights how the global pornography industry shapes not only what we see, but how we name and understand it.
My favorite room, deliberately left unlit during the opening, features a silver gelatin print of a marble statue of a mother and son, captioned with gold vinyl letters that spell TIGHTMOM.COM, as well as a full-size golden vanity engraved with the chilling phrase Keep It in The Family. The capitalization of the phrase—also the title of the piece—is no accident. By capitalizing “It” and “Family”, the artist underscores, on one hand, the discomfort and silence that surround discussions of sex (and sexual abuse) within families, and on the other, the institutional reverence granted to the family as a social unit. The piece becomes even more disturbing when one learns that the vanity, according to its original owner, was passed down through generations of women in her family, much like stories of abuse, which are also often inherited in silence.
The show claims other senses, too: it forces you to engage. In the main hall, three mirrors hang behind golden tulle, waiting to be unveiled. Through a closed door, a speaker plays male voices reciting explicit pornographic titles; the entire space is infused with the scent of Fuel for Life, a discontinued men’s cologne by Diesel. On the opening night, Colombian artist Camila Arévalo performed an erotic dance in an ivory satin corset and thigh-high black leather boots. A circular mirror covered her face, revealing the truth the show’s been meaning to tell: desire is but a reflection, both on a micro and macro scale.
In the zine that accompanies the exhibition, Delano includes a short story recounting her first contact with pornography as a child: she sits down at the family computer for a game of solitaire, but is instead met with multiple open windows of porn—kiddy porn, specifically. The shock of the moment is compounded not only by the physical violence of her mother, who lands a blow on her, but by the realization that this is content her grandparent—and primary care-giver—consumes.
The anecdote is offered not as a confession, nor as a condemnation. Like the exhibition itself, it circles back to a space where intimacy, violence, and family coexist without clear resolution. Delano doesn’t present her work as disruptive or defiant; instead, the work invites us to sit with what is already present: the banality of porn consumption, the cultural pervasiveness of incestuous fantasy, the proximity between rejection and embrace. What Delano’s work reveals is not scandal for its own sake, but the subtle ways in which structures of desire and power shape our most familiar spaces—not at the edges, but at the very center of the so-called nuclear family.
— Lia Quezada
Truth or
Heft Gallery | 300 Broome Street, New York
April 23 – May 10, 2025
Edward Burtynsky and Alkan Avcıoğlu, Hypertopographics #1 (2025). Archival pigment inkjet print (1/1 + AP), signed on verso, 56 x 84 in. Mounted and float-framed in hardwood. Courtesy of the artists and Heft Gallery.
On April 23rd, Heft unveiled its inaugural group show, Truth or, featuring artists whose work stems from, complicates, or dissects systems—digital, physical, structural, and philosophical alike. Combining his background in art dealing, photography, and an interest in digital media, the gallery’s founder and director Adam Heft Berninger had transformed his online curatorial platform Tender into something that can be experienced spatially, pushing back against the negative or mercantile connotations often associated with art that uses generative AI, machine learning, and various other forms of digital image manipulation. Truth or signals the beginning of a chapter that moves toward more sustained engagement with artists working at the intersection of code and cultural critique.
Among the most striking contributions is a collaborative piece by Edward Burtynsky and Alkan Avcıoğlu—a pigment inkjet print that blends Burtynsky’s epic environmental photography with Avcıoğlu’s algorithmic recomposition, resulting in a chilling new landscape that feels both hyperreal and deeply uncanny. Similarly, Roope Rainisto’s piece straddles the line between technical renderings and psychological effects, calling into question the aesthetics of authenticity. Whether through Margaret Murphy’s hybrid figuration or Emi Kusano’s cyber-surrealist visions, these artists reflect a shared urgency: to build new visual vocabularies that reflect our hybrid human-machine condition.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
Megan Plunkett: Beep If You Boop
Dracula’s Revenge | 105 Henry Street, store #4, New York
April 18 – May 25, 2025
Megan Plunkett, The Hollywood Upstairs 01, 2025. Inkjet print on gatorboard, 32 x 55 x 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist; Dracula’s Revenge, New York; and Emalin, London. Photo: Jason Mandella.
Like writing, photography has crystallized into a “legible,” marketable medium through the reduction of production obstacles, barriers to entry; the dominant contemporary style has become available, immediate. That expectation of immediacy trammels the ineffable and formally indefinite. Ambiguity unsettles a standardized system of signs: the readymade input-output relation of the machines of image or of language.
Machines estrange us in the sense that they make it easier to produce and handle things of the material world without care. Input, output: Beep If You Boop. It’s a logical premise in code or nature or game theory: if/then, Newton’s Third Law, you get back what you put in. Megan Plunkett treats her object (a chameleonic Pepsi can shot at three angles, suspended from an invisible wire—a classic Hollywood trick—with its logo suggestively taped over, isolating the subtext CALIFORNIA’S CHOICE) with precise, romantic attention; in photographs that range in texture from hostage-cam surveillance footage to holy glowing beverage commercial to an image (pictured) as luminous and deeply toned as a seventeenth-century oil painting, quality reflects the care she invests.
Plunkett enjoys scrambling signals. Though Ruscha looms large in the show’s loopy title—which floats off a bumper sticker to hover over the erstwhile gallery door in glossy red vinyl like a passing specter (Dracula’s Revenge is a migrating establishment)—and in the blown-up billboard aspect of the works themselves, her forms remain blurred and hallucinatory, subtler than the explicit contours of ad copy.
She understands the strategic language of display across time, the provocation of desire for objects. The object is the subject of a photograph, which becomes a discrete object itself. Details form themselves in relief along narrative outlines, hardening into iconography where the light falls or dropping away into alternating shades of depthless space. The most striking photograph suggests a glistening, high-contrast display still life: a popular reference of late, as the flow of global commerce remains top of mind. Plunkett stages the obscured Pepsi can as both a classically beautiful luxury object and a fungible readymade.
Language itself is a sign—we use the term still life (direct from the Dutch stilleven, which includes manufactured objects: tangible accessories to life) as opposed to a derivative of the French nature morte (dead nature), which implies a focus on the organic. Still, Plunkett’s object is not quite not-alive; jellied in the camera eye, it has a viscous, syrupy quality, a touch of something ripe and lurid or the lick of a flame in the dark. Her work is evasive—it shines in its perpetual slippage, its ability to sublimate and transform—just as you think you’ve pinned it to the wall, there it goes.
The show is also very Southern California gothic. Plunkett, who hails from Pasadena, worked for a private investigator and trained as a forensic photographer; the background hum of film noir colors the city just as it establishes itself here, across registers.
There is, too, an unmissable elegiac materiality: specific reds and cuts of light that could not exist outside the long shadow of David Lynch, who himself slipped away in January as wildfires tore through his beloved Los Angeles. Lynch cared for objects and images alike. He saw that Hollywood is as American as commerce and shiny surfaces—our sleepless, dreaming, accelerationist machine heart; the center of production of our icons, our visual language—it pacifies us, it answers to us, its sins and signs reflect our own. The Hollywood of images will never burn. It may live forever, or as long as we care to picture it.
— Matilda Lin Berke
Salman Toor: Wish Maker
Luhring Augustine | 531 West 24th Street, New York
May 2 – June 21, 2025
Salman Toor, Fag Puddle with Heads, 2024. Charcoal, ink, and gouache on paper 12 x 17 7/8 inches (30.5 x 45.4 cm), Framed: 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches (44.3 x 59.5 cm). Photo: Genevieve Hanson © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery.
Salman Toor’s first solo exhibition with Luhring Augustine is a two-part show of paintings in Chelsea, and drawings and etchings in Tribeca. There is a battle raging across his practice between the body and the space within which it exists, whether it is in the natural setting (A Meeting Place (2024)) or in an artificial structure in (Ward (2020)). Sometimes the body becomes a part of the environment such as in Coral Room (2025); sometimes the body is the environment as it becomes so architectural such as in Boys Changing (2024) and The Rescuers (2024); and in some there is a refusal to integrate, seen in Collection (2025). There are, of course, some where the synthesis of these forces comes into being more glorious than ever should be possible: The Beach (2023) is one such work on paper, while Cross Street (2025) and Walking Back (2025) are two paintings that epitomize this.
Beyond the lush monochromes at which he is so adept, there are scenes that break away into much more concrete territories, almost always populated by figures in situations of intimacy, nudity, or relaxed solitude.
Portraiture is another entire strand of exploration in this massive two-site presentation. The slightly odd, slightly unreal leads down a path of questioning whether choices were made for the sake of comedy or not. Toor’s use of humor is as jovial as it is dark, perhaps positioning the audience in the awkwardness of not knowing whether or not to laugh along; this he achieves beautifully in the painting The Joke (2024). This aspect of the disturbing is present in the four Fag Puddle works on paper, presenting still-life compositions with human figures and decapitated heads in an almost slapstick production, yet with a sense of extreme vulnerability.
If not for anything else, the tender scenes of intimacy—whether in the emptiness of Mommy’s Room (2024) or the quietness of The Cuddlers (2025)—are enough to justify all the interest around his work. Intimacy is, however, not enclosed within private spaces, or it is probably better to say that all of Toor’s world, extending through each of his works, exists simultaneously in both the private and the public—and it is up to the viewer to choose their place in the narrative.
— Abbas Malakar
Violence, Beauty, and Resistance: Draper and Robertson vs. Societal Decay
May 8 – May 19, 2025
Mriya Gallery | 101 Reade Street, New York
Installation View of Violence, Beauty, and Resistance at Mriya Gallery. Courtesy of Lora Robertson.
Just as there is beauty in the small things, there are a million tiny horrors—a mechanical coldness underlying the minutiae of life, each moment of domestic and urban life ticking in the back of our heads like a time bomb. In reconciling the stark, everyday violence of modern living with the human need for beauty and harmony, Satellite Collective featured artists Lora Robertson and Kevin Draper have discovered a reverberating, revolutionary space in their art in which pain and suffering can co-mingle with simple, childlike beauty, uncovering a vast swath of emotional ground which floods the head in a staggering orchestral manner with their latest multimedia showcase, Violence, Beauty, and Resistance: Draper and Robertson vs. Societal Decay at Mriya Gallery.
Through sculpture, paintings, and photography, Robertson and Draper call to mind the hardships of working-class American life and urban decay, as well as the continued exposure and implication in global violence we have grown accustomed to in the States through their keen sense of juxtaposition, pinning images of war, resistance, and brutality sharply against traditional and sentimental elements of everyday circumstances. Within each of the works, there is tragedy, a well of darkness, and a near-promise of a future where brutality is the norm. But out of this well comes a thread of resistance. A near-promise is not the same as a guarantee. In the photo series, The American Yes, as Robertson’s Molotov cocktail ignites, still by still along the gallery wall, the choice posed by this exhibition becomes clear: will you light the spark of resistance, or will you allow your oppressor to take you up in their flames?
— Zara Roy
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