Killing Me Softly

Philip Crawford
Nicolo Gentile
Rachel Hsu  

July 6 - July 29, 2023
Opening Reception Thursday July 6th, 5-8pm

In Killing Me Softly, artists Philip Crawford, Nicolo Gentile, and Rachel Hsu reclaim the infrastructure of the everyday by presenting new work that catalogs small moments of pleasure, pain, and place making. 

Through borrowed and repurposed forms, their work suggests the
importance of the inscrutable and delights in the exertion of meaning making.

Rachel Hsu's SWEET NOTHINGS (FEAST YOUR EYES) examines the complex relationship between sight, consumption, and language. As viewers’ eyes strain to discern the repeating white text of her reimagined eye chart against the white wall of the gallery, the act of looking becomes visceral. Through this exertion, the idiom “feast your eyes” gradually breaks, and a common expression of pleasure dissolves into something more sinister. The text, cast in white sugar, calls to question the notion of visibility as an inherent good or goal, and the ways in which marginalized people are expected to perform consumable identities.

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Crawford’s work revels in a world of protected spaces embedded with mechanisms of self-defense. Combining references to martial arts instruction manuals and Enlightenment texts with implements of meditation and tools for the protection of private property, his sculptural installation and prints consider how secret knowledge generates power. 

The aggressive playfulness of his cryptic text-based silkscreen series How to Kill a Squab challenges the ways we make things make sense. Viewers are called to sink into uncertainty rather than to seek immediate answers, to follow flights of intuition, give into magical thinking, and imagine new methods of escape.

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The study of place-making is also central to Nicolo Gentile's found-object intervention. Engraved across a stainless steel trough urinal, an image emerges: a lone figure traverses a wooded park and picks his way over piles of branches and felled trees. This appropriated image, scrawled by Gentile's deft hand, could be found above the headline “Trees in a Queens Park Cut Down as Vigilantes Harass Homosexuals,” (New York Times, June 30, 1969). 

Drawing inspiration equally from traditional 17th century pastoral landscape etchings and graffitied backroom stalls, Gentile uses the act of defacement as a means of memorialization and reverence. Mounted Trough (Flushing Meadows) reclaims a moment of violence targeted at queer bodies, re-siting that historical moment into a subcultural space of pleasure, pain, and release.