“I moved to Bushwick back in May,” says Sam Blumenfeld, originally from New Jersey but more recently arriving from a stint roundabout Columbia University, where the RISD grad picked up her latest degree. Previously, she had spent a decade in South Korea, running a screenprinting studio in Seoul. In Bushwick, she appears in tire-colored leather pants, a Grinch-esque thrift store vintage jacket, and a t-shirt that reads: live, laugh, lesbian. “All the cat meme art is mine,” she says, perhaps unnecessarily.
If you ask Blumenfeld, she will tell you that her diligent recreations of the traditional illustrations of the lolcat find in them vehicles for various human emotions and cultural debris, like something you might find in a Naomi Fry column. It’s the organizing idea around Hyper Meme, a show Blumenfeld has been putting up inside “Living Skin,” itself the name of a gallery that appeared, just as suddenly, two years ago on a largely underused corner of Wyckoff Avenue. Needless to say, both were launched with lengthy manifestos.
The one from the gallery dates to early last year and refers repeatedly to the unfortunately cult-like sounding “New Existence Framework,” abbreviated frequently as “NEF.” The text reads like something out of a Cronenberg movie. “This is our mission and response to the NEF, to manifest a Living Skin,” it reads. The gallery had been started by a group of artists who had appeared in the neighborhood, led by Jerome Hua Wang, described by the gallery as “a healthcare strategist, service designer.”
Buried under a baseball cap and a graphic t-shirt, Wang demurred when I asked him about his gallery’s overall point or focus. He had found the place “on Streeteasy,” he said. Before he took it over, it had been an electronics store where a small-time real estate YouTuber who goes by the name Cash Jordan lived inside as a stunt, in a video that was viewed some 700,000 times. Posing in front of Three Diamond Door, Jordan says “if you want to move to Brooklyn and still be a hipster, this is the neighborhood you should be thinking of.” When Wang and his friends took it over, the first show they ran was an extended deconstruction of a car accident Wang had been in, an exhibit called “What They Don’t Tell You When You Get Hit By A Car” that involved decorating his hospital bed with medical intake paperwork.
Per Blumenfeld’s manifesto, she cites a handful of things, like “In Defense of the Poor Image,” a 2015 academic paper by Hito Steyer, a German film artist with a few pieces in MoMa, that expanded on a 2009 essay Steyer wrote that valorizes the idea of the degraded and digitally reproduced photo, what she calls “an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image.” The manifesto from Blumenfeld applies a similar logic to the idea of “reproduced” memes, which she says “exist as part and parcel of culture, nationality and linguistics,” in a statement she has printed out and photocopied. The whole idea reminded me a bit of that old viral Brian Feldman essay in the Awl on the “shitpic,” but I suppose we all find the essay decoding online imagery that we are looking for.
“She is hard to avoid,” says Blumenfeld about Steyer’s influence. Per Blumenfeld, the show is a response to another text, “Hyper Optimization: Creative Stagnation Amidst Cultural Abundance,” a self-described “50-page cultural dossier,” penned by a group of artists, some of whose work appeared at the show. This text had been published by a consulting firm, which called itself the Office of Applied Strategy, started by former SSENSE branding consultant Tony Wang, also one of the dossier’s co-authors.
At any rate, Blumenfeld is using the idea to showcase at least three of her own pieces, including a heavily saturated illustration of a cat called sad girl hours and another, on the other side of the room, showing a cat holding a baseball bat under the text: REGRET IS A PRIVILEGE.”
“I could have chose differently, but I made a choice, and then I realized the fact that I was able to make that choice meant that I had so much privilege,” says Blumenfeld. “We’re all looking at the same memes.”
If you find this kind of stuff illuminating, she writes about it further on her substack, which she calls “Post-internet Praxis.” Sample post: “Cat memes and personal semiotics.” If her sense of imagery comes forth pretty straightforwardly, her imagination nonetheless retains the collage-like sensibility of the internet. In a pair of graphite drawings in the other room, also involving cats and called “america WILL NEVER. Be a SOCIALSIT country,” she reproduces some funny images she found while scrolling the internet. She says these illustrate the way memes eliminate context.
“I came across an Instagram reel that said: which chipmunk is getting the most painful radiation poisoning? And the image that it had was from a [piece] of Alvan & Chipmunks fetish art, it was the chipettes giving oral sex to the chipmunks. But instead [here] the image of the chipettes’ heads was replaced by images of radioactive materials,” said Blumenfeld, in front of a crowd of some six people on a recent weekend, including two of the people running the gallery. Since debuting on Valentine’s Day, the show landed another review, from another local arts blog, that described Blumenfeld’s whole bit as immaculately funny.
Also in the crowd was Victoria Reshetnikov, a 3-D sculptor based in Queens, whose work was similarly ubiquitous in the show. Her pieces radiated with a kind of technical, Duchamp-esque optimism. Hanging in front of the window, looking over the avenue was Transpassing Rumination, an enormous wheel she had made, decorated with hieroglyphics that she said represented video games she played as a kid. Another piece, It’s Great That ur here, literally jumps out of the wall like a pop-up ad, but its her piece Anatomy of a life well spent, on the opposite side of the gallery, where Reshetnikov’s language of jumbled online signifiers accomplishes a masterful coherency and brings to mind Robert Indiana’s folk Americana signography.
Other experiences of the internet abounded. Assembled in a tiny corner was an installation of digital prints assembled by Wang, the former SSENSE consultant, and which appeared to be a collection of faintly manga-like illustrations. On the other side, and much larger, was an elaborate computer screen erected by Ash Hagerstrand, a Brooklyn artist who goes by @jesusluvsmemes on Instagram, where they say they call themselves a “digital maximalist making shrines to un-wellness.” This one was called Bleach, staple and cleanse your way to an optimized anal cavity 🍑 and was, in fact, decorated with various illustrations of peach emojis and illustrations that looked like concept art for The Substance. On the screen, a pop-up would flash over and over, reading refresh ur asshole.
“You have to imagine that’s a found text,” says Blumenfeld. Pointing to a canvas painted by Xianglong Li, a Magrette-like illustration showing a cellphone with a gun on its screen, Blumenfeld says she likes the piece because “It’s not real violence.” But also, “I think you could also extend that into thinking about the ways that a phone could kill someone.”
Blumenfeld suddenly notices a tattoo in one of Li’s paintings, a scorpion that appears on Li’s adjoining canvas too.
“This kind of tribal style of tattoo was something that was prevalent in the ‘90s but came back as an online aesthetic. Health goth, I hate that I know that,” she says. “We’re just hoping to have it all sold.”
“Hyper-Meme” is installed at Living Skin at 61 Wyckoff Avenue until March 15th, by appointment. Contact the gallery for more details. It will also be open for a final “closing + panel discussion” on March 15th.
Top image from “When you woke up after sleeping for 24 hours” by Xianglong Li.
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