In Harlem, gentrification has yet to reach a former factory that is currently home to New Uncanny Gallery. The site has an origin story or history that remains a mystery. Parts of shooting for Joker (2019) took place here. The film of course needed the real grittiness of the space for its artificial claim to subversion and transgression. No one knows how much physical alteration happened to the building to accommodate certain feelings the Joker crew wanted to evoke.
Obviously, there is a sense of urgency to stage exhibitions inside the space, soon it will be demolished. To do something with the space before losing it is the original impulse of an image of your labor hovers over me, which is far from a protest or an act of dissent—radicalism is impossible when every oppositional gesture is assimilated into the public realm of social reproduction. Rather, the exhibition takes “I will haunt you,” often the last thing the oppressed says to the oppressor before forced disappearance or execution, as a point of departure to disseminate various forms of semi-private speech, however minor, localized, or peripheral, in their most legible circulation: passionately affected presentations and images that will hopefully insist on lingering after physical ruptures of the space that holds them. Another kind of commitment to organizing traces and relations of labor that is unafraid of overstaying its welcome and defends Romantic taxonomies of idealism against purely materialist understandings of resistance. Your luxury apartment building will always be my graveyard.
Inside the former factory, an office space is emptied of its managerial function and only occupied by specters of promises of economic mobility.

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- Quinyang Deng

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In the front room, the four-person show, an image of your labor hovers over me, embodies a muted sense of dissonance, musing on the process, imprint, and surveillance of labor and value generation. Gunner Dongieux’s paintings, for instance, are serially numbered and labeled, with tags such as “MATERIALS,” “DECONSTRUCTED ARCHETYPE,” and “LIVE STREAM MONETIZATION SCHEME.” Imageries imbued with popular and digital appeal adapt to the surrounding space—iconoclastic and somewhat dystopian with vertical orange, yellow, and blue stripes. Leading up to the show’s opening, the artist had utilized the space as a temporary studio, streaming each work session through Twitch. Considering commissions, online distribution, and the aestheticization of the creative process, Dongieux’s practice questions commodification and cultural relevance. Irreverent, humorous, and sometimes cartoonish, his work seems to nuance and reconcile with expectations of intellectualization, mass appeal, and stylistic continuity within one’s art career.

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- Xuezhu Jenny Wang for Impulse Magazine