New Museum’s Triennial Preview

PHOTOS & TEXT BY WHITNEY MALLETT

There is a sense of alien possibility at the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience. Six years after weirdo video artist Ryan Trecartin was featured in the inaugural triennial, he has returned as a co-curator and, together with Lauren Cornell, has selected an international group of 50-some artist and art collectives whose works interrogate our post-digital reality of hyper-commodification, consumption, and surveillance. From DIS’s “Island” installation inspired by high-end bathroom-kitchen manufacturers’ Pinterest moodboards, which periodically features a live performer taking a horizontal shower to “wash away stress,” to Frank Benson and Juliana Huxtable’s life-size 3D sculpture “Juliana,” these works find poetics in the absurd and other-worldly but never lose a human-oriented perspective. The show opens today at the New Museum and is up until the end of May. 

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