Press Release for New Decay by Kay Kasparhauser
Entrance Gallery - February 13 to March 15, 2025
48 Ludlow Street, Lower Level Gallery, New York. NY, 10002
Gallery Opening - February 13, 6-9pm
Artist Talk / Walk-through with Jak Ritger - February 16, 2-3:30pm
If Decay is the architect of the wall between life and death, what else can it build?
In her debut solo exhibition, New Decay, Kay Kasparhauser presents a new body of assemblies using the detrital vernacular of insect terrariums, de-sterilized polystyrene, image imprints and material examinations. In Entrance Gallery’s subterranean space, the artist has constructed a tableau morte from the scaffolding of her personal and discursive interrogation of biological expiration. Rather than submitting to non-existence, Kasparhauser provokes the aliveness she insists is inextricably tied to decomposition. Grow lamps illuminate the amber siennas and mossy indigos of isopod habitats. A colony of growth and rot teems atop the municipal ochre of a traffic barrier. The misleading beauty of an invasive species is preserved through organic pigments. It is the fecundity present in dead matter that produces our abject disgust: refuse writhing with warm maggots. But, so too does the wildflower growing above the grave.
This exhibition is the latest in a series of artworks and essays probing what Kasparhauser has called “Inadequate Container Anxiety,” defined as fear of (or desire for) exceeding what one can possibly hold within: physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Turns of phrase betray this anxiety, “I can’t contain my love for you, my heart will break open,” or “I’m sorry, I’m too busy, I don’t have enough time.” The demands of the contemporary situation on a person's mind and body are a study in contradictions. Just as our corporeality is an inadequate container for all that is demanded of it, so too is the narrative arc of life when it feels impossibly restrictive for all we desire. The container in this situation begins to dissolve, allowing the outside in. A divergent vantage point emerges, looking sideways at the life-death continuum: this is the “chronos” in chronic illness.
With existential claustrophobia as her starting point, Kasparhauser explores the edges of our containers through an assemblage of remnants, run-off and artifact. Having identified Decay as an architect, the artist pursues a patinated collaboration. Durational performances by isopods* — decay-eaters whose waste feeds a bustling population of springtails — microscopically demonstrate the delicate, perpetual motion of rot. Macroscopically, the city and its ceaseless development, deterioration and recomposition, are represented in poly foam pieces sourced from the excess scraps of a packing plant. They are contorted, exploited and constricted; forced to exceed the container of their intended purpose. The entire exhibition can be seen as a tiny organism metabolizing the material and visual protein within the city’s churning stomach.
New Decay is not a show “about” death, but rather an exhibition that surveys the boundaries of life in a faulty container constructed by decay. Kasparhauser employs death as raw material, using its chaotic shadow as a brush to imprint the eternal.
-Text by Jak Ritger
*Works feature two species of isopod: Armadillidium maculatum and Porcellio Laevis
Kay Kasparhauser's studio in preparation for New Decay
About the Artist:
Kay Kasparhauser is an artist and writer based in New York City. Her work spans sculpture, assemblage, digital collage, garment, essay and editorial. In April of 2024, she produced two works for the “Unrequited” group exhibition at Spy Projects NYC. From 2021-2024 she co-created Paradigm Trilogy I, II, & III, an experimental fashion provocation. As part of this project, she directed a perfume editorial titled “Sweat by Paradigm” that used the body’s smell as the formula for a designer scent. In 2023, following a hospital stay, she created a residency at Nine Orchard, transmuting the patient experience into series artworks. In 2022, she published “THIS IS GUNNA SUCK”, an essay exploring the virtue of suffering through the lens of MTV’s Jackass. @WIP.TBA.001 is a long running grid gallery of digital artwork on Instagram. Kasparhauser is involved with mutual aid and harm reduction at the community level.