{"id":185475,"date":"2025-10-02T17:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T17:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/185475\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T17:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T17:20:08","slug":"p-staff-delivers-the-years-scariest-show-at-david-zwirner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/185475\/","title":{"rendered":"P. Staff Delivers the Year\u2019s Scariest Show, at David Zwirner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI can\u2019t recall a recent exhibition as terrifying\u2014and as moving\u2014as P. Staff<\/a>\u2019s current show at David Zwirner<\/a> in New York, the kind of big swing that has become rare in this city. It\u2019s a haunted house of sorts, with spooky sounds and sculptures parceled out across three floors of the gallery\u2019s Upper East Side town house. But there are neither ghosts, zombies, nor evil creatures lying in wait. Instead, the horror evoked here is a dread of the more ambient variety: the horror of having a body.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a topic evoked most explicitly in the exhibition\u2019s central piece, a new video called Penetration (all works 2025). The work depicts a person standing motionlessly in place while a laser is beamed at their bare stomach. Installed in parts, so that it appears to stretch across all three of the show\u2019s floors, the video renders it impossible to see the person\u2019s body in its entirety\u2014the middle level, for example, offers only a view of a towering, tattooed abdomen.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

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\n\tPenetration is not exactly body horror in the classical sense: It contains no images of blood and guts across its 20-minute runtime. But it is deeply unnerving all the same, in large part because of its gargantuan size, which draws a comparison between the gallery and the human body. When this person respires, it begins to feel as though the walls are breathing too.<\/p>\n

\n\tMega-galleries like David Zwirner are places you go to forget your body: You go there to admire beautiful, expensive artworks, not to think about what you\u2019re doing as you\u2019re looking at them. In turning this David Zwirner space corporeal, Staff makes it impossible to think about anything other than your body.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tP. Staff\u2019s David Zwirner show resembles a haunted house, minus any supernatural creatures.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy David Zwirner<\/p>\n

\n\tThe windows are covered in a film whose jaundiced shade of yellow suggests urine and bile. Meanwhile, the sounds of a beating heart emanate from a speaker on the ground floor. Right now, being inside this town house feels like being inside a living, breathing thing.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe experience can be uncomfortable, in no small part because this organism\u2019s innards are all jumbled. The speaker broadcasting the sounds of a heart, for example, notably is not in the heart of the gallery. The portion of the video visible on the ground floor, meanwhile, does not contain footage of its subject\u2019s lower extremities. One could conceivably say the show is just as much about dysphoria as it is itself dysphoric.<\/p>\n

\n\tStaff has previously said<\/a> their work embodies a form of \u201ctrans poetics,\u201d though their films and installations have steered clear of neat political statements. Their contribution to last year\u2019s Whitney Biennial\u2014an installation that first appeared at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2023\u2014included an electrified net hung above viewers\u2019 heads, suggesting both a nervous system and a form of endangerment. The piece was one of the most debated ones in the show, a fact that makes it all the more surprising that this is not just Staff\u2019s first show with David Zwirner, but with any New York gallery. Some critics singled out the installation when they wanted to claim that that Whitney Biennial was chock-full of art that was too evasive, too safe, and too boring. (I disagreed.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tP. Staff\u2019s video Penetration (2025) is split across David Zwirner\u2019s three floors.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy the artist<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Zwirner show may very well weather similar criticism because Staff clearly has a lot on their mind, even if they don\u2019t always reveal their ideas so readily. Arrayed around this former residence is a group of sculptures that feature wood spikes beneath latex drapes. The sculptures variously resemble partially packed furniture, humans cocooned in bondage gear, and aliens emerging from soft shells. Each work is titled with a variation on the word \u201cdistrain,\u201d but it\u2019s never entirely obvious how the pieces refer to the seizure of one\u2019s property or money.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAcross the gallery, P. Staff has installed sculptures that do not explicitly state their meaning. They various resemble partially packed furniture, humans in bondage gear, and alien beings.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy David Zwirner<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, I\u2019d argue that Staff\u2019s slippery art is engaged with the present, and that the Zwirner show stands as proof. It\u2019s striking to consider what Penetration might signify right now, at a time when an oppressive administration in the US seeks to police the bodies of trans people. (It\u2019s probably worth noting, given the obliqueness of it all, that this London- and Los Angeles\u2013based artist has previously used their work to directly take up \u201cvoluntary\u201d sterilization laws in the US, hinting at a broader interest in physiological violence sanctioned by the government.) What might it mean that a green beam of light is aimed at the video\u2019s subject, in what may be a medical examination or perhaps even a surveillance scan? And what might it mean that this person seems totally disaffected by it all, at one point lighting a cigarette in spite of the laser? Staff intentionally offers no tidy answers, leaving their subject in a state of uncertainty that befits our current moment.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd moreover, what might it mean that all of this is so beautiful? The video periodically strobes with deep blue, bold red, and bright white, bathing this lavishly installed show in an array of lush hues. Perhaps Staff is saying that body horror need not only generate fear, for it can also inspire transcendence and searching about who we are and what we\u2019re made of. A pity\u2014or maybe a blessing\u2014that the scariest show of the year closes on October 25, six days before Halloween.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I can\u2019t recall a recent exhibition as terrifying\u2014and as moving\u2014as P. Staff\u2019s current show at David Zwirner in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,88004,356,75,93242],"class_list":{"0":"post-185475","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-david-zwirner","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-p-staff"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}