This Week’s Reviews: Jane Swavely, Ash Fure, and a Group Show at Spielzeug

Nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about.

Jane Swavely’s newest body of work an explosion of smeared and stroked oil paints, a play on transparency and opacity, gestures and traces. These works are visceral and OTT—like a trip—there is so much to see in each of them. Yet, traces within them draw us back to reality—Strawberry Fields has a bootprint on its upper middle, “a vintage Prada boot from the 90’s,” she explains. Who paints in vintage Prada? Jane! I also see her handprint in Not Yet Titled. The colors are loud-bubblegum, orange, turquoise, and silvers, and whites and beiges in her oil stick works on paper. Alex Israel’s directorial debut SPF-18, with the tagline: “when you grow up in LA real life and the movies can get a little mixed up” came to mind. The American Dream coming-of-age film centers on four kids who just want to surf and be creative as they spend a summer in Keanu Reeves’ beach house. Turquoise water, beige sand, ombre pinks and purple, a red and white beach dress, and speech marked by a lower jaw set the tone. The film was meh—too naive, overly nostalgic, stuck. Swavely’s newest body of work leans into the same dream mythos of experimentation, lightness, and artificiality, but, from an abstract vantage point that tethers on the edge of gross and weird, a little zany. Unlike SPF-18 (wearing sunscreen is arguably one of the most responsible things one can do), which is anchored in reality, Swavely’s work is an attempt to distort and expand it through color.

I spend a lot of time with the work. I sit on the stairs in the gallery. Partially resting in the A/C, but also letting the canvases pull me further in. In Strawberry Fields, I all of a sudden notice a flicker of yellow. As I consider a phrase from the Beatles song that the exhibition takes its title from, “Nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about,” Swavely has managed to make the works feel flippant yet worked through—speaking to layers of reality, allowing the viewer to effortlessly get lost with them, without risk to their sanity. It is difficult to be light but moving, beautiful but thought-provoking, at Magenta Plains, Swavely masters that balance.

Jane Swavely: Strawberry Fields was on view May 7-June 20, 2026 at Magenta Plains,149 Canal Street.

Behind Closed Doors, Front and Center

“Looks fade with age,” goes the saying, but asking anyone with a credit card will tell you that, in reality, with age, to avoid fading, one can artificially enhance. Remember the plump “pillow face” of the 2000s? That look has been chemically drained and replaced by the “Mar-a-Lago” face. Spielzeug’s latest show, of the same name, recasts the facial phenomenon—sharp cheekbones, or chiseled jawlines, for men, taut and wrinkle-free skin, apple cheeks, heavy make-up, and, lots of spray tan—that deifies Trump’s signature orange hue and his Palm Beach golf-club, as artificial, debauched, unhealthy, and sinister through mostly haunting imagery. The show leans into the idea of shedding light into darkened corners. Like, sexual deviance. Marissa Delano’s engraved gold framed mirrors Daddy, I want anal (2025) and Pervy Daddy (2025), a painted version of Jeff Koon’s render, but with faces closer together, Michael Jackson and Bubbles Closer than Ever (2026) or the spectacular oil on canvas About Diplopia and Other Ways of Seeing (Judith Beheading Holofernes) (2026) where Marek Wolfryd has created a double vision version of Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous painting with the gaze of each subject meeting the viewer and those pictured, blur the line between incest and roleplay, bestiality and friendship, dominance and submission. These works do not copy, but rather reexamine, thereby raising the question of what behaviours we as a society might condone in public but allow behind closed doors. In the unfinished basement of the temporary Lower East Side gallery space, on a plaster cast neo-roccoco style shelf, sit five books each about a polymarket prediction: Will Kanye West Visit Israel by June 30?, a story about a group of kids, ends with: “The Gatekeeper had lost. The Heartland was awake. And the Covenant was written in stone.” Prediction markets are now a 20-million-dollar industry, totally out of control, with few guardrails for insider trading. A recent study of Polymarket shows that 0.1% of active users capture over half of all financial gains. Without insider knowledge expecting to make it big is, like the Fiverr-labor written books, a fantasy.

Martine Gutierrez Plastics are photographs of women with saran wrap over their faces—Mar-a-Lago face on a budget, or women packaged, like dolls. The women in Catherine Mulligan’s oil paintings, Argument and VIP Section, most closely resemble the look; these creatures, with their leathery skin and mismatched faces and body parts, are both haggard and blinged out. The show is large—hybrid animal-humans, pearls, so many enlarged hands, tits and ass—all narrate a clusterfuck of porn meets conservatism meets historical precedence: contemporary U.S. myth-making for the MAGA movement in a post Rupaul’s Drag Race world.

The Mar-a-Lago look is promoted by Maryland/Virginia plastic surgeon Dr. Shervin Naderi as “a modern aristocratic mask—surgically sculpted to convey affluence, precision, and control”—and you know that if it’s reached in MD and VA, it is widespread. So seize control! Schedule your deep plane facelifts, brow lifts, lip lifts, hairline work, fillers, and Botox, and get yourself a Mar-a-Lago face because with the friction at Capitol Hill, slowdown of governmental agencies, ongoing war in Iran, defunding of healthcare, and as Trump’s family continues to make deals that line their own pockets, the United States is a declining superpower. Call your local daddy and play golf at Mar-a-Lago to survive.

Mar-A-Lago Face featured Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Camila Arévalo, Marissa Delano, Cameron Patricia Downey, Martine Guttierez, Demon Lovers Inc., Sergio Miguel, Catherine Mulligan, Roger Munoz, Lic. Sniffany Garnier Odio, Motero Tranquilo, Ivana Vladisava, Marek Wolfryd and was on view through June 27, 2026 at Spielzeug, 165 Allen Street.

I Can’t Work it Out

Conceptually, I understand why gym equipment is fertile ground for artists, especially those interested in movement, sculpture, and sound. The equipment holds a multitude of physicalities, as static objects, and when activated, kinetically. Interconnected pulleys, levers, ropes, and weights activated by feet, hands, and body weight merge metal, rubber, plastic, and skin, flesh, and bone into one or several movements. I remember a familiar chink chink chink, metal hitting metal, from various machines at the gym. And, exercising at the gym is a performance in itself. People watching and being watched. But must these monotone movements, aesthetically displeasing machines, and the basements and sleek floor-to-ceiling rooms they inhabit become art? Ash Fure says YES in her installation ANIMAL [a listening gym] at Pioneer Works. Here, visitors are invited into a darkened room to activate workout machines, and muscle strain is replaced by vibrations. Or, as it were, one of the most ubiquitous gym accoutrements, ear pods, are replaced with two mason jars that I put over my ears as I lie down awkwardly in a machine. The jars are attached to rubber strings. “Should I pull them?” I ask my friend. She walks out. I am reminded of so much of the silent communication that goes on at the gym. The email I received from Cultural Counsel lists Fure as a “Berghain Regular”—I see it, the show is cool, tech-heavy, and grungy. Please go to the gym, but be wary of those who make it their religion (ahem: gym rats/bros). What are they trying to escape? Or am I overthinking it?

My mind wanders to Matthew Barney’s project SECONDARY that delves into the life of an injured American Football player through an immersive installation (a football field in his former Long Island studio) and sculptures that incorporate dumbbells and barbells. I saw the Long Island installation and the show, objects revisited, at Gladstone, and found them ambitious but weak. I walk out, not finishing the sensory circuit work-out—I miss the voyeurism and meeting between public and private, and the actual work out that shapes the OG gym experience.

Ash Fure. “ANIMAL [for body and sound],” 2026. Performance at Pioneer Works. Captured by the author.

Fure’s performance ANIMAL [for body and sound] is visually striking. She stands at one end of the great hall at PW, a circle of light behind her, the circular window above, where the clouds are rolling by, gives a beautiful effect. Microphones surround her on a table, and in her hands she holds a hard plastic sheet energetically moving—sound? vibrations? “Where is the sounds coming from?” I whisper to my friend. “Is it all vibrations?” She doesn’t know. Fure is an Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College, the co-artistic director of The Industry, and a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music so I know that there is something technically advanced and fucking cool going on on stage, but I am not quite sure what. Fure is an incredible performer; the sound is filmic, a little dystopian, but I am not moved by it.

Ash Fure: ANIMAL [a listening gym] is on view through August 9, 2026, at Pioneer Works. Second Sundays, July 12, featuring Fab 5 Freddy, Ash Fure, Juma Sultan, Emmett Palaima, and more is free with RSVP.

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