Circa 2010's Cultural Debris Club - "No Ceremony" 2025

Tashi Salsedo - kiss in c major 24×36", acrylic paint, pencil, archival inkjet print on canvas, artist made frame, 2025

BY SERENA HANZHI WANG July 8, 2025

I didn’t cry when it ended. I opened Instagram instead.

This is the frequency of “No Ceremony”—not grief, not warmth, but the theatrical aftertaste of overexposure. The girls in the paintings are poised, their gestures wrapped in powdery eye shadow and calculated vacancy. You look at them, but it doesn’t feel like they’re looking back.

But you still look.

Not because it’s the most beautiful art on earth, but because of the simultaneous presence of attraction and repulsion. It feels familiar, but over-familiar. These works are precise in their form, distant in their tone, and standing in front of them feels like watching your catharsis get captured and posted by someone who got 100k+ followers—with the comments turned off.

Campus says "No Ceremony" builds on the legacy of the Pictures Generation, concerned with a world oversaturated with images. Therefore the images here don’t mimic life anymore; they mimic the performance of life as seen through a thousand cropped screenshots and artificial gestures. It doesn’t seek your transformation, or redemption. Absence is the god.

Yes, we can’t look away from these works, yet they don’t comfort us either. What they offer is something more lingering: a slowed-down seduction. I think these artists—MessArt kids with cracked iPhone 4s and beautiful emo disillusionment—are not rejecting image culture. They’re taking it hostage. The next screenshot is their medium.

There’s no latex. Just two toner-black prints bleached in harsh contrast, grainy like faxed memories. Danka Latorre’s diptych, How to Cope (Poser 02), shows two side-by-side images. A thin arm, a suffocated face, someone in a tank top with the word 'Killers' across their back—harsh, almost camp. Like true crime podcast fan art? Something about it feels so powerful for me, but kind of wrong, of course. Do we still want to wear pain as merch?

Next to it, in Born to Pose (Poser 03), the Misfits skull—mint green, acidic—floats like a logo that’s lost its band. It’s surrounded by murky shadows, one of which looks uncannily like Mima from Perfect Blue. Checkerboard borders hold it in place like a Hot Topic frame job. These aren’t girls. These are avatars of nostalgia with no source file. Latorre, Co-founder of Campus. Her logic is pure Tumblr-core: a flickering mix of melodrama, and that unplaceable aesthetic like a prom dress never taken off. Her website mutters things like “blue girl,” postpartum depression, and the Selena Gomez complex.

 Danka Latorre - How to Cope (Poser 02) 31×20" gum bichromate on canvas, oil pastel, colored pencil 2025

Danka Latorre - Born to Pose (Poser 03) 25×31" gum bichromate, colored pencil, duct tape, epoxy 2025

Jamieson Pearl’s Acquitted (sarahfuckingsnyder) is 18 by 18 inches, oil on linen, depicting a girl—duh, Sarah Snyder—staring directly out, framed by a gray bureaucratic seal that reads "Seal of the Town of Bedford, NY." Her gaze is flat but deliberate, like she knows she’s been looked at before and will be again. The brushwork is tight, almost pixelated, a reminder that this isn’t just an oil portrait—it’s an interface.

Sarah's mugshot painting looks like an algorithm trying to remember what skin is supposed to be. Pearl’s genius isn’t just in how she paints, but in what she chooses to paint. Why Sarah Snyder? Why render a tabloid girl—the kind that once trended on Tumblr for stealing Birkin bags—into this cold, devotional stillness? There’s something perverse and perfect about it. I think she's trying to paint a kind of true internet sainthood, despite (or because of) her disposability in culture. Cultural debris like relics. In her own words, it has to do with “the confusing mix of empowerment and exploitation, community and trauma that defined platforms like MySpace, Tumblr, and early YouTube."

Jamieson Pearl - Acquitted (sarahfuckingsnyder) 18×18" oil on linen 2025

Maybe art is something you repeat until it stops hurting. A circulated version of pop culture, like vacuum-sealing a JPEG. What you’re looking at is a chart of digital residue, curated scandal, and hairstyle-as-narrative.

Tashi Salsedo and Drew Sedlacek—the other two co-founders of Campus—offer two opposite poles in how boys process memory. Salsedo’s kiss in c major is dreamy in grayscale. Two androgynous people lean in to light a cigarette between their mouths. Behind them: a musical score, the lyrics just legible enough to read “I see a stranger look in you...” It’s tender in the way that reminds me of the first time I watched NANA when I was 14. The ink bleeds like overexposed film, with golden clouds floating over everything like smoke or memory or both. You kind of want to roll your eyes when you see stuff like this, but then your throat tightens a little.

Then there’s Sedlacek’s Trading Cards. Five photographs of high school football players printed small and mounted on glossy faux-mahogany plaques. Each boy looks straight into the camera like he’s about to get drafted or cry or both. There’s something almost cruel about how earnest the photos are, how deeply they believe in masculinity as roleplay. Sedlacek doesn’t mock them, or save them either.

Together, the works form a mirrored diptych: Salsedo gives us intimacy as performance, Sedlacek gives us performance mistaken for intimacy. One is about the mouth and the eyes. The other is about the torso and shoulder pads. Both are mourning something they can’t name, and neither is willing to laugh.

 Drew Sedlacek - Trading Cards 5 pieces, 4.5×6" each wood, stain, resin, c-print 2025

Then there’s Jaylen Cooper, whose Where Annihilation Dwells is operatic in its stillness. The figure is frozen mid-scream, arms stretched like a séance in progress. Pale streaks drag down from the sleeves like ectoplasm. It’s eerie, oversized, and devotional. A performance that’s already possessed. If Sedlacek and Salsedo give us boyhood as memory; if Latorre and Pearl give us femininity weaponized through image—then Cooper’s figure becomes the hinge point: all performance, no gender, no class, pure haunting.

I think Campus is less a gallery exhibition than a group chat that learned how to frame things. Like a finsta. It’s not that the work is unserious—it’s that seriousness doesn’t look the same anymore. Most of their shows only last a single day. “No Ceremony”, with its epic three-day run, already feels almost eternal by comparison. Campus is doing the kind of thing that makes you feel like your peer already lived it—and looked really hot doing it. That’s the thing with the indie sleaze revival, isn’t it? It's not optimism or even nihilism. It’s that in-between state where everything’s kind of going to shit, and you feel weirdly good about it. WM

Jaylen Cooper- Where annihilation dwells 49.5×67.27" archival inkjet, charcoal, acrylic paint 2025