Kian McKeown’s drawings are exercises in improvisation: they are hasty, surreal sketches prompted by the incomplete, “unformed” thoughts he can only articulate in abstract one-liners like “arm and hammer” or “head and handle.” Registering somewhere between the witticisms of Lee Lozano’s tools and Gary Larson’s “Cow Tools,” the resulting subjects are vague, dreamlike mashups. They are unrecognizable objects, removed from reality in order to invoke the metonymic chains of recall and association. Here they seem to represent two serpentine trash pickers (or frayed cables), a broken bone, a spring (in a broken mattress, maybe), and a partial rope knot. Where there is desire, there is lack, as per Lacan—a perfect object that can never be attained. As Lacan observes, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.” McKeown’s drawings conjure the objet a in their incompleteness: their partial objects set desire in motion, but their failure to be whole inspires uncanny mutilations. His sculptures, on the other hand—a four-foot long sausage roll with a horse inside it, an exploded rocket prop on a tripod, and an oversized, freestanding wooden T-shirt dress—appear to be perfect and complete, but their elements remain separate and foreclosed. They only open up through the wound of incompletion. Each high-gloss, impossibly-smooth sculpture, it turns out, is crafted from cardboard, toilet paper pulp, and sand, among other humble materials. Their awkwardness denies us the usual markers of success and satisfaction, and instead takes up an antisocial promise of failure, which is the point.

Likewise, Arthur Palhano’s paintings also traffic in the sudden vicinity of things that seemingly have no relation to each other. He calls these floating signifiers “cold images,” referring to their relative loss of circulation in contrast to “warm images,” which he defines as the most rapidly circulating popular images of the current moment. By Palhano’s strict criteria, in order to cultivate “a dymanics of the ordinary,” cold images must either be (1) visual devices from vintage advertisements, preferably from the 70s and 80s; (2) motifs from canonical paintings; or (3) elements from the universal iconography of children’s drawings, like hearts, trees, and smiley faces. This visual vernacular is also site-specific to wherever the works are exhibited, as in New York where they incorporate the iconic Coney Island Steeplechase Face, a baseball glove, a Little Trees car air freshener, and a “DELI & GROCERY” sign—all cohabiting with Catholic motifs and images of Jesus Christ, the Grim Reaper, and tattoo-like symbols rendered with the renegade graphic style of a “rebel carving on a school desk.” To do this, Palhano uses a kind of reverse impasto technique: he begins with an underpainting of an entirely different, and usually unseen, subject, then covers it in several accumulated layers of paint, and carves into it once dry. He explains that his subtractive method, together with his contrast of ordinary and theological subjects, indicates his desire to “make horizontal the experience with the divine.” This adjacency of extremes has a disorienting effect. Palhano has provided them with a common locus, and the bare fact of their juxtaposition is enchanting—like Foucault’s proverbial umbrella and sewing machine on the operating table. Their proximity, as he points out, is proof of their relation.

Each of the distinct partial objects in Palhano’s and McKeown’s works talk to each other about their incompletions and come alive by losing themselves. Their simplified elements are reduced to a geometric point: a dizzying feeling of absence, of indistinctness—of crazed laughter. Laughter is revelation, as Georges Bataille notes, who Palhano cites as a major influence. It has a frictionless, superfluid character, and is often unfounded: we laugh until we cry; we follow it to its explosion point. But unlike other forms of expenditure, laughter doesn’t result in a loss—instead it embraces the art of losing, as Palhano’s and McKeown’s works do. Their lack of completeness accepts the finite and embraces the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy, à la Jack Halberstam. Rather than resisting endings and limits, they seem to suggest, as Halberstam famously does, that we “instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.”

– Amelia Farley