I take these Stupid Walks^TM around the city. Instead of actually exploring any of the five boroughs, Stupid Walks are more like watching sitcom reruns, except the TV is your own two feet. I don’t like the show most of the time, but there’s one cool scene that should be just a block away. Maybe I’m mad at myself for my lack of time management, or maybe a vital kind of communication is occurring just below consciousness.

Underfoot is the first exhibition by curator Elizabeth Sundahl and features 12 new pieces by local artists. The show explores the overlapping ecosystems of city life, mending the aesthetics of urban and natural, artificial and organic. It read to me as a re-aestheticization of cybernetics, encouraging visitors to recognize it in the world as it exists instead of in science fiction.

Pushup Gallery (94 Bogart St.) opened in November and, if I’m counting right, this is their fifth exhibition. Underfoot was curated from an open call that asked for works “explor[ing] overlooked, small-scale, and often invisible ecological systems – with a focus on those existing in NYC.”

Sundahl is one of a four person team that runs Pushup Gallery. I got a chance to talk to them outside the glassy exterior that showcased Matthew Diesing’s large poster piece and the grass pathway to Sara Carlsen’s video installation Please Curb Your Dog – presented on an old TV equipped with headphones. The actual sod on the gallery floor was Sundahl’s idea. 

Also present was Caleb Stoltzfus, whose cardboard sculpture depicted a magician listening to the ground. The sculpture doesn’t show the street he’s listening to, but I imagine it being similar to Molly Burt-Westvig‘s textural asphalt piece. I wonder if the magician also goes on Stupid Walks. 

One of the most striking pieces was Xinchen Li’s 3D-printed sculpture of a Converse shoe, its black wiry outline meant to evoke the lantern fly imprinted on its sole. Pointed slightly downward, it forms a vaguely cocoon-like shadow underneath it. Also eye-catching is Samuel Leone’s beautifully rendered oil painting depicting the dark recess of a subway platform. 

Andrea Matthews’s installation consists of papers, remade from waste, scattered on the ground to correspond to the locations of waste facilities throughout the city. They said that their main form is printmaking, but the spatial resonances of the theme inspired an installation. The exhibition casts a wide conceptual and aesthetic net, which is only fitting for the scope of the project. 

City life doesn’t always make sense, at least not immediately. In such a densely packed space with so much going on, you need to be sure to watch your step.

Photos provided by Elizabeth Sundahl. Check out Underfoot at Pushup Gallery Saturdays from 1-6 p.m. or by appointment.

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