Hauntological Reverberations in an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery

Installation view, an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery, New York, 2024. Courtesy New Uncanny Gallery. Photo: Liam Murray.

By LUCIA CAO December 14, 2024

To live an urban life is to adapt to a perpetual state of impermanence—Baudelaire has said something like this about modernity. In the late-capitalist city, we’re all too familiar with this: a local restaurant replaced by a boutique hotel, a historical cinema demolished to make room for a new parking lot. Words like gentrification are too abstract to fully narrativize the violent and absolute erasure of pasts that were once present. an image of your labor hovers over me, curated by Qingyuan Deng, lingers upon such fated disappearances, drawing a parallel between the invisible local histories that haunt a space and the unobserved artistic labor behind the refined façade of a finished work. The four artists’ in situ creations exhibited as processes of production function as testimonials of the temporal existence of the gallery space of New Uncanny—a former factory—in between its mysterious past and unknowable futures of continual repurposing.

Installation view, an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery, New York, 2024. Courtesy New Uncanny Gallery. Photo: Liam Murray.

Upon entering the exhibition space, one would find it difficult to immediately tell the artworks apart from elements of the retro office setting, where some scenes in Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) were once shot. Installed against the striped wall on the right is Christian Amaya Garcia’s piece On-call (2024), which responds to a video performance in 2021 titled Over-Hydrated Concrete Line in which the artist rolled a concrete line on the ground for thirty minutes. The installation—a paint roller precariously placed on the edge of a bucket—commemorates the happening of the event by evoking a sense of anticipation for its very happening. Blending in with the raw surfaces of the office borrowed for the staging of the exhibition, On-call is indexical of a past production, but also a site-specific re-iteration of production that participates directly in the becoming of the space.

Installation view, an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery, New York, 2024. Courtesy New Uncanny Gallery. Photo: Liam Murray.

Also situating artistic labor within the repertoire of metaphors supplied by the office is artist Adriana Furlong, whose Top of Mind (I can only promise you) (2024) and Even When the Work is Tough (2024) echo the tile fragments scattered on a desk or contained in paper storage boxes, suggesting work in progress. Furlong’s works are themselves hauntological images of labor, but have undergone layers of (re)mediation: she photographs bas-reliefs of workers on New York City buildings, 3D-prints and casts them to concrete, and finally re-maps them onto a new frame. By doing so, Furlong unsettles the modernist symbology that flattens the affective and material complexities of production into smooth surfaces. The resulting painting-sculptures are not intended as standalone aesthetic objects of pictorial rearrangement, but rather as reproduced historical images of labor, with the artist’s own creative labor acting as a synergistic double.

 Installation view, an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery, New York, 2024. Courtesy New Uncanny Gallery. Photo: Liam Murray.
 

The making-visible of artistic labor processes continues with Gunner Dongieux, who takes a very literal approach—creating commissioned works on-site while streaming the process live on Twitch. In his interventions, Dongieux deconstructs the image- and meaning-making network of painting as a medium, a practice, and a career. By exhibiting studio notes and reference images alongside the actual paintings—labeling the former with a numerical system and titling the latter according to what they are (Commission, for example)—the artist playfully elevates these peripheral elements of artistic creation to the same status as the paintings themselves. Typically concealed beneath the final product, which is often deemed the sole focus of attention, these components—ranging from pop culture references and painting materials to sketches and the act of painting itself—are nonetheless indispensable parts of the apparatus that is painting.

Installation view, an image of your labor hovers over me at New Uncanny Gallery, New York, 2024. Courtesy New Uncanny Gallery. Photo: Liam Murray.

A recurring theme throughout the exhibition is the subtle disruption of polished exteriors, flawless finishes, and seamless operations, revealing the complexities, negotiations, and processes beneath the surface. In Dominic Palarchio’s untitled series of impressions on paper (2019), the images are created as traces of soiled rags pressed onto paper, serving as imprints of weight, contact, and tangible material encounter. Displayed as a group of eight, each impression stands as an individual moment, encapsulating a unique interaction in time and space that varies in density, pressure, and composition. They evoke the physicality and embeddedness of artistic creation as an event in everyday reality. A similar gesture is taken in Christian Amaya Garcia’s Demonstration Drawing series (2024), which is also about the imperfect transferral of marks onto the surface. Taped across columns, desks, and walls within the office, these drawings document the sculptural process in ways that photography cannot—offering spontaneous, layered impressions that resist the notion of a singular, resolved image.

Suspended between states of completeness and incompleteness, abandonment and construction, the artworks and the exhibition site inhabit a liminal, dialectical temporality. Conjuring apparitional traces of the past while casting ghostly shadows into the future, these works in becoming resonate within the space of transition. Together, they challenge the conventional belief that only finished works merit display and only well-furnished spaces are worth entering. WM

an image of your labor hovers over me, curated by Qingyuan Deng, is on view through December 20th, 2024, at New Uncanny Gallery.