TOY STORY
Installation view of TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!, 2025. Image courtesy of SPIELZEUG, photography by Sebastián Ore Blas.
Good hostessing requires, to some extent, the surrender of the self: a similar exercise to the practice of curation. An effective curator sublimates themselves (their taste, their theory) into an elastic form, arranging and containing the fixed forms (artworks and their appreciators) on display, thus encouraging relation, recognition, and communication, producing unity from fragments.
In her modernist theories of creative and social life, which injected English literature with the detached, God’s-eye atonality of contemporary capitalism, Virginia Woolf attempted to murder the feminine Victorian phantom of “the angel in the house”—the teething substrate, the palliative, the space, the pure and yielding canvas, the hostess, the mother—which she perceived as the impediment to making real art. The thing is, you can’t kill a spectre. There are few more deeply artistic acts than willful submission: to a vision, to an audience, to our collective material conditions.
Thomas Liu Le Lann, Mace, 2021. Denim, vinyl, cotton, steel, and wadding, 95 in. x 16 in. x 5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
Showing art, as in the presentation of objects, requires both host and artist to submit to the consideration of the viewer: the critic, the collector, the institution, the casual enthusiast. Curator Evan Karas’s TOYS! TOYS! TOYS! unfolds in SPIELZEUG’s chimerical gallery space adjoining a bar on the Lower East Side: part house party, part fetishistic toy store, part rubber-tiled jewel box freak show, part glossy, cherry-red womb. On the show’s packed opening night, several of the works on display, including Thomas Liu Le Lann’s floppy, sock-wearing “soft hero” Mace (2021) and Chloë Walker’s horrifically buxom, lumpy plaster- and plastic-skinned Satyr (2023), were non-consensually, albeit accidentally, kicked around. Talk about material abjection—such is the life of a performer.
Christopher Gambino, Judy nods off backstage, 2025. Clock, chair legs, stockings, shoes, and resin, 25 in. x 22 in. x 17 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
In a corner, Christopher Gambino’s Judy nods off backstage (2025) is anchored in a perverse sprawl, hosiery lacquered over her lower body like a bondage suit of armor. The title of the work evokes famously exploited child actress Judy Garland’s “incautious self-overdosage (accidental)”[1] as much as it describes the action of the object itself: the antique clock body hasn’t ticked for a long time now; the heeled chair legs were always useless and static, incapable of movement. The show’s only isolated photograph, Miriam Simanowitz’s pigment print Jane Doe (But Jane Doesn’t Die) (2025) is a literal valley of the dolls—most of whom have had their eyes scrubbed away—lit like a Hudson River School landscape. To soothe and entertain you, Rosie Gibbens’s The New Me (2022) plays fake ads (in the vein of absurd 90s made-for-TV content) on three channels: a tripartite Hey Bear Sensory Fruit Salad Dance Party, a defanged candy-colored hydra. You can’t buy the nonexistent advertised products, but you can buy their theoretical images in art.
Installation view of TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!, 2025. Image courtesy of SPIELZEUG, photography by Sebastián Ore Blas.
A further series of offerings prostrate themselves on the perpendicular wall. A disembodied hand clutches a manual massager on one side of a phallic spine in Untitled (after Luske) (2025), Max Runko’s swordlike “boy toy” (one of two in the show). It emerges like a sleep paralysis demon made from overlaid transparencies printed with disparate, vaguely recognizable, vaguely threatening digital artifacts: the analog remix of a creepy composite meme. Fortune (2025), Hua Wang’s animatronic turtle held out precariously in a cold marble grip, squirms when it’s turned on upon request. Above an unsettling door-knocker belly button and open, outstretched palm, the agender chest of Josh Rabineau’s Nipples Are the Windows to the Soul (2025) hosts voyeuristic peephole portals to two domestic but vacant worlds through, you guessed it, the nipples. In the left, a room of one’s own; in the right, a mise en abyme of windows; in both, the sweet architectural heart of the object, the human, the curator-artist. If you ask, you can listen to Julie Béna’s velvet-and-lace baby Ouin..., ouin (Gala) (2021) crying “Mama” from an artificial voicebox and sewn, wide-open mouth.
Where there are high-maintenance children, there are always more toys. Leon Zhan’s pristine, meticulously enameled Greenbay Packers Celadon Vase (2022) shines as a false original, a commercial relitigation of a decorative icon. The child figure of JJ Hammond’s Rest (2024)—perhaps the show’s most sensitive work—curls up in the fetal position (tummy hurt), colonized by small, white figurines encrusting the form like a landbound coral reef. In oblique parallel, Amanda Ba’s series of three small paintings depicting disemboweled Lamb Chop plushies serves as both use case and blood sacrifice. Rather than fluff, the subjects’ injuries reveal innards, bones, and musculature.
Installation view of TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!, 2025. Image courtesy of SPIELZEUG, photography by Sebastián Ore Blas.
Objects are differently inflected based on their socioeconomic and cultural contexts, though they retain inherent qualities. They are slightly but crucially transformed as they pass from hand to hand through settings and life stages. What appears simply as a securitized parcel of value can possess—like a symbol, reference, or site of memory—temporal layers of associated material and emotional information. (Look no further for such a model than the work of Lucia Hierro, the contemporary successor to Claes Oldenburg, whose monumental fabric-based bodega products interrogate capital just as much as they embody it.) Michelle Im’s Traffic Girl (2025), for example, engages with the aesthetics of ceramics, a traditional East Asian medium, while encapsulating the mechanisms of their worldwide distribution by copying and distorting them. Her deliberately clunky rendition of a Pyongyang crossing guard’s celadon-pastiche face suggests a once-regional, now international, beauty standard: glass skin.
Michelle Im, Traffic Girl, 2025. Ceramic, epoxy, acrylic, enamel, 10.5 in. x 7 in. x 24.5 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
What is art but a series of progressively shinier, repackaged, modulated toys? It has to mean something more than that. Though money buys you a lot, it can’t buy everything; discretion and arrangement remain essential. Hosted in the context of TOYS! TOYS! TOYS!, the anthropomorphized objects on view engender aura (in both the colloquial and Walter Benjaminian sense), relational actions, and even feelings. But are the feelings they provoke in you theirs, or your own? Who is the true hostess of desire: the object, the viewer, or the electric potential generated in the space between the two?
Kerin Rose Gold provides this raucous ecosystem with something of an answer in Apex Predator (2025): a 3D-printed Labubu stuffed with the auxiliary waste of its own production, armored against criticism under a carapace of hand-laid crystals. It seems to glitter of its own accord, projecting and reflecting light onto its pedestal in a sparkling, fleshy lattice-pattern network. Like its officially licensed commodity-fetish kin, it surveys a global empire arranged in its image—the hybridized, interlinked capital superhighway selling itself on dreams and affect—with a toothy, smug, self-satisfied grin. It’s pretty cute, though. I’d let it follow me home.
Kerin Rose Gold, Driving Force, 2024 (left). Crystals, adhesive acrylic paint, air-dry clay, crystal package waste, leather, 4 in. x 4 in. x 12 in. Apex Predator, 2025 (right). Crystals, adhesive acrylic paint, air-dry clay, crystal package waste, leather, 5 in. x 5 in. x 9.5 in. Photography by Matilda Lin Berke.
TOYS! TOYS! TOYS! is on view at SPIELZEUG from September 3 through October 25, 2025.
[1] Howard Markel, “The day Judy Garland’s star burned out,” PBS News, June 21, 2019.
