An ersatz exhibition space constructed within a pre-existing institutional environment. Flat work is hung on both the interior and exterior walls. Works on the interior walls include the series Joker Paintings and Dylan’s Downward sDiral, while the diptych Detention Chamber is hung on either exterior wall.

Joker Paintings is a series of abstract expressionist interpretations of the character The Joker, a character from the Batman comics and films who over the past decade or so has taken up a place as a zeitgeist for disaffected people throughout the world at large. This series is inspired specifically by memes posted to the subreddit r/gangweed, a community of people identifying as gamers, who modify pre-existing images by crudely drawing The Joker’s white face, red lips, and green hair over people using MSpaint. The content of memes posted to r/gangweed in this fashion is generally nihilistic in nature, a characteristic of many subcultures who use The Joker as a motif. The underlying appeal of The Joker seems to be a character who is aware of the inherent absurdity of life within Late Capitalism but is content to revel in their own self awareness without willing to identify any progressive project which could allow society to move past the apparent dead end of financial capitalism.

Dylan’s Downward sDiral consists of three works, each containing pages from the diary of Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. The drawings within each piece are grouped by shared subject matter. Love includes drawings related to the desire for love and physical affection, the drawings in A Virtual Book: Existences concern explorations of existentialism and meta fiction, while the standalone drawing in Doomguy is more what someone might expect from a teenager who would go on to commit what at the time would be an act of unprecedented violence and cruelty: a crude depiction of the protagonist from the video game Doom which at the time of the Columbine shooting was at the center of a cultural panic concerning violence in media.

The diptych Detention Chamber consists of two roughly identical depictions of an isolation room taken from Matt Groening’s early comic strip Life In Hell. The room is a running gag in the comic strip, where the adolescent protagonist of the strip, Bongo, is imprisoned for some unknown misdeed. The punch line of each strip is generally given by an unseen authority figure who observes Bongo from the slot in the door. Installed on the exterior walls of the installation, these paintings operate as artificial windows, allowing viewers to look into an idealized version of the room’s interior space.