GAYLETTER

Artist Justin Chance’s reverence for writing is evident. Through double entendre and other jeu de mots, he develops titles that carefully amuse his audiences — his ecstatic charm nearly puckish in its ability to complicate as it elucidates. For his first solo exhibition at Tara Downs gallery in New York, he began with the title, Live, a play on the homonym /liv/ the verb and /laiv/ the adjective, eliciting a dual meaning — both aliveness and its eventual mortality, and the immediacy of the moment — existence and instance. While the works in the show span two calendars commemorating the twin towers (along with a third calendar created by Chance including dates of personal loss for the artist) and an image of the late Jenni Crain, a close friend of the artist who passed in 2021, much of the exhibition’s focus is a series of quilts, each evoking a state or concept related to being overloaded and overwhelmed. Quilts like Green Screen (2022–23) and Black Box (2023) are handspun effigies of media culture, signaling intrinsic transmutation and postmortem surveillance. Other titles, like Depression (2022) and Aloha Sadness (2022-23) point with a waggish finesse to melancholia and desperate isolation. Both overtly and covertly, the exhibition examines loss — of people, of place, of time, of image.

“Green Screen” (2023).

“Textbook” (2022-2023).

“Aloha Sadness” (2022-2023).

“Depression” (2022).

Chance uses a wet felting method to make a surface from scratch by soaping, stretching, and then rolling wool with bamboo mats. …

As a baby in Israel during the Gulf War, artist Adam Liam Rose experienced a climate of anxiety with the fear that Saddam Hussein was going to bomb the region. He remembers a box of family photos that included images of his parents wearing government-issued gas masks and his tiny, cherubic self crying inside a crib enclosed with a plastic bubble featuring a glove insert to nurture an infant in the event of a quarantine. They found out later it would probably have done nothing to protect a baby from the disastrous effects of a chemical weapon attack. Instead, these gestures on the part of the Israeli state were likely false reassurance that the public was being considered and protected. Rose can point to numerous examples of Israel’s attempt to surreptitiously manipulate minds and fortify land — including Route 443, an intercity road stretching through the West Bank to connect Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that is stealthily secured with anti-sniper walls.

The artist moved to the United States just after 9/11 during the Iraq War, coming of age in a time when propaganda promised safety and comfort to those who embraced nationalism in defense of an amorphous “freedom.” It wasn’t until attending college that he gained a sense of lucidity, watching documentaries and propaganda videos on YouTube for research. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then Columbia University, he began making and installing large-scale sculptures often with video components, structures that riffed on the menacing and mothering panopticon and other forms of safety architecture. …