To Confound or Excite?
Installation view of Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, September 11–October 25, 2025. © Nayland Blake, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Nayland Blake’s exhibition at Matthew Marks is threefold: a minor retrospective of the artist’s seminal work from the 90s, a selection of other artists’ work that Blake curated, and a new installation piece nestled behind the latter in the gallery’s back space. For Blake’s biggest show in New York in close to three decades, it’s unsurprising to find such varied modes of presentation. Rising to prominence in the 90s San Francisco art scene, Blake’s career has been distinguished by its variation and unpredictability. The artist’s repertoire spans sculpture, performance, video, drawing, writing, and curation, each vying for the spotlight across Matthew Marks’s two spaces. Blake’s work is known to challenge, and this exhibition offers a puzzle for even the most ambitious viewers.
Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s occupies the 522 West 22nd St gallery with a survey of Blake’s early work, curated by Beau Rutland, which primarily deals with queer culture during the AIDS crisis. Upon entering, you’re confronted with the piece Arena #1 (1993), which is a square steel cage with four protruding posts, each adorned with a black cloth mask. The brutal barrier is anthropomorphized into a group of consenting participants within a closed circuit, excluding the viewer. Nearby, a leather collar dangles inches from the floor from the end of a long steel rod emerging from the wall. The two mirrors of Mirror Restraint (1988–89) frame this piece, but are turned downwards to reflect nothing but the floor. At the other end of the entry space stands a clothing rack crowded with absurd garments, masks, and plastic body parts, titled Equipment for a Shameful Epic (1993). The body is implicated in all of these works, but remains absent. Sex is not visibly illustrated, but insinuated through structures of control, restraint, and identity play.
Nayland Blake, Untitled, 1992. Mixed media, 61 ¼ x 44 in. © Nayland Blake, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Continuing in, the legibility of the work grows ever more elusive, as each piece is subjected to a different material logic. In Come Armageddon (1990), a Morrissey poster hosts a shelf with a video cassette of The Third Man and a pile of potpourri. Inside a vitrine, a yellow plush toy stands next to a pile of fifty-six loose pom poms, titled One Down (1994), reminiscent of Mike Kelley’s plushy works from the same time. Adjacent, Untitled (1992) appropriates Herb Ritts’s photograph Fred With Tires, Hollywood (1984) with the face cropped and supporting a framed CD of Pixies’ 1988 album Surfer Rosa. Ritts’s homoerotic image of a muscular shirtless man was infamously found in the apartment of the gay serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Blake’s obscurant tendency casts the viewer astray in a landmine of cultural signifiers, each containing a Pandora’s box of implications. With the juxtaposition of these references, Blake speaks to an implicit violence and brutality in queer culture—but without having a deep background knowledge or a guide, can the metaphorical punchline still land?
Installation view of Inside, curated by Nayland Blake, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, September 11–October 25, 2025. © Nayland Blake, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Although characteristic of Nayland Blake’s practice, the lack of cohesion in Sex in the 90s may ultimately alienate the viewer from accessing their conceptual language. This may be an issue with the venue, as the work included could easily make up a small institutional show rather than occupy a blue-chip space in Chelsea. Continuing next door, Inside is a selection of work by 14 artists curated by Blake, which fortifies and converses with the tone of Blake’s retrospective, including, at times, its inscrutability. Inside has immediate formal parallels with their retrospective next door: sculptural assemblage, photo collage, and appropriative practices are at the fore. Like the title suggests, the selection appears to be tied by an exploration of interiority through figuration (Frederick Weston, Wangechi Mutu), scenography (Betye Saar, Richard Foreman), and literal boxes (Joseph Cornell, Nancy Shaver, Edward M. Plunkett). Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Aviary) (c. 1950) presents the viewer with the opening of a box seemingly blocked by wooden slats. But upon close inspection, you can peek through at the right angle to glimpse an interior mirror reflecting a taxidermy bird and the word “Hotel”. With Inside, Blake suggests an interiority of delicate and labyrinthine construction, host to cultural memory and guests who oscillate between average visitors and unwilling captives.
Installation view of Nayland Blake: Session, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, September 11–October 25, 2025. © Nayland Blake, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Once you pass through Inside, so to speak, you’ll find the metal chain-link door to Session, Blake’s new sculptural installation. As you pass through the doorway, the floor mat announces “GO” as you enter, and “COME” as you depart. Within the enclosed space, the viewer is confronted with a sleek black examination table, adorned with draped chains and plastic jewels around its base. A circular mirror and a microphone stand are fixed near the inclined headrest. At the foot end stands a post with a tag declaring “I betrayed” in chalky, cursive lettering; from it dangle aluminum cans, each similarly labelled with categories such as “my family,” “my community,” “my craft,” and “my secrets,” among others. Surrounding the exam table, a thick chain runs along the walls, supporting objects for varying erotic, masochistic, and medical functions, such as a black bunny mask affixed to plastic skin, glass dildos, leather strap-ons, and hospital bedpans. What sounds like static noise emanates from an unseen speaker. There are no cameras, you are unobserved; the room is invariably tense, uncomfortable. Session creates a set for action that remains unperformed, violence that is unexecuted except within the viewer’s own imagination, so that we become the violent subject, the perpetrator of our own punishment.
Detail shot of Nayland Blake: Session, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, September 11–October 25, 2025. © Nayland Blake, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Session follows in the lineage of Blake’s Restraint works, which utilize the material of BDSM and kink culture on absent bodies or inanimate objects to conjure the specific power relations at play. Session is arranged like an intricate scenography that transposes the behavioral relations of queer sex into the realm of theatricality. But if we apply the logic of theater, then the visible branding on the sex toys breaks the supposed fourth wall, dragging the general atmosphere back to specific objecthood. When the checklist credits “Grinders by Creature Feature Toys,” Session may slip into the aesthetic language of product placement and brand marketing, indistinguishable from a pop-up sex store. Blake may be somewhat of a post-studio conceptual artist, but it suits them best not to show their hand, so to speak, when they play no part in the actual making.
Between Sex in the 90s, Inside, and Session, one can’t leave Matthew Marks complaining of a lack for much, except perhaps comprehension. Nayland Blake’s work may be at its strongest when it eludes any quick hermeneutics or resolution, or for some viewers, it may seem to perform (perhaps annoyingly) illegibility. Whatever your stance, there is no doubt that Blake succeeds at continuing to challenge expectations and interrogate queerness and power relations with a rare conceptual rigor and multicultural awareness. By inviting viewers as active participants into their unique material logic, Blake’s work outlines our prejudices and our vulnerabilities, offering an aesthetics of reflection rather than of prescription. We may not always have access to exactly what they are trying to tell us, but we can access how we feel about what they are doing—a process that continues to evolve and activate the work long after leaving the gallery.
Nayland Blake is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery from September 11 through October 25, 2025.