{"id":325980,"date":"2026-03-12T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T13:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/325980\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T13:09:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T13:09:16","slug":"our-critics-favorite-show-this-month-is-hidden-in-a-subway-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/325980\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Critic\u2019s Favorite Show This Month Is Hidden in a Subway Station"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of Harrison Kinnane Smith\u2019s \u201cTracings and Arrangements,\u201d 2026. All installation imagery courtesy of Emmelines.<\/p>\n

Harrison Kinnane Smith
Emmelines<\/a> | 660 5th Ave (MTA Station Mezzanine)
Through March 21<\/p>\n

Emmelines occupies a former newsstand in the Fifth Avenue & 53rd Street MTA station, one of the retail spaces on the mezzanine level, along with a Dunkin\u2019 and a barbershop. Easy to miss (straphangers race by without a second glance), it\u2019s tucked against the wall just before a short flight of steps leading down into a tiled tunnel that spits you out on the doorstep of the Museum of Modern Art\u2014or, actually, in a maze of scaffolding across the street and about a block east. Regardless, Emmelines\u2019s proximity to the hallowed institution is striking and defining enough so that when I first heard about the new gallery from a friend (it opened last year, in September), I was told it was \u201cin the subway station under MoMA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even better, the bunkerlike venue is beneath the cursed building formerly known as 666 Fifth Avenue. That\u2019s the property, you might remember, that a young Jared Kushner bought for a record-setting $1.8 billion in 2007 and scrambled to unload in 2018 before the ruinous mortgage came due\u2014by which time the skyscraper was appraised at around half what he paid. A story of billionaire-class venality and a real estate deal\u2014that is, a bailout with national security implications\u2014it\u2019s the surprising, invisible backbone of Harrison Kinnane Smith<\/a>\u2019s site-specific, administratively complicated, conceptually recursive exhibition \u201cTracings and Arrangements.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"LouiseLouise Lawler, Bulbs (traced), 2005\/06\/19. Image courtesy of the artist, Spr\u00fcth Magers, and Emmelines.<\/p>\n

The artist has made good use of both the gallery\u2019s gritty allure\u2014its mysterious, almost unmarked presence in the subterranean commercial strip\u2014and its capacity to display wares. He\u2019s filled the floor-to-ceiling glass shopfront with a view of two MoMA-caliber<\/a> works by Louise Lawler, on consignment from Spr\u00fcth Magers. Like enlarged coloring book pages, the black-and-white compositions, traced from her earlier photographs and applied as decals to a custom-built white wall, are inscrutable, drained of detail. Pristine beneath fluorescent lights, the images have a bright, cartoony graphic power that makes a startling kind of sense alongside the grimy, glowing ad spaces of the MTA labyrinth.<\/p>\n

One of Lawler\u2019s works here, Bulbs (traced), 2005\/06\/19, features the string lights of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres sculpture, uninstalled, laid out on a moving blanket. The other, (Bunny) Sculpture and Painting (traced), 1999\/2019, shows a gleaming Koons rabbit and a geometric abstraction by painter Peter Halley, which Lawler photographed together in the Whitney Museum\u2019s critically maligned 1999 exhibition \u201cThe American Century.\u201d The artist\u2014whose subjects are famously the artworks of others<\/a>, often captured in moments that tell something of their roles in the realms of commerce, collecting, or d\u00e9cor\u2014has made the production of recycled, recombinant versions of her own artwork (enlarged, traced, or distorted new versions) a mainstay of her practice. Often offered as unlimited editions with customizable dimensions, Lawler\u2019s pictures glide efficiently through the systems she means to make transparent, traveling like contrast dye through the connecting branches of private, corporate, nonprofit, and (for lack of a better word) alternative contexts.<\/p>\n

\"\"Louise Lawler, (Bunny) Sculpture and Painting (traced), 1999\/2019. Image courtesy of the artist, Spr\u00fcth Magers, and Emmelines.<\/p>\n

Here, we find them below ground and under the radar, their materialist mission boosted and intriguingly rerouted by Kinnane Smith\u2019s framing. The younger artist (at 28, he is Lawler\u2019s junior by 50 years) presents the pair of tracings as his opening move in a chain of gestures that extends her concerns. His title \u201cTracing and Arrangements\u201d echoes that of her first, 1982 show at Metro Pictures, \u201cArrangements of Pictures,\u201d for which she offered (alongside a group of her own cropped images of historical works in museums) a selection of works by her peers (Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, among others) at a 10 percent markup: her consultant\u2019s fee. Emmelines\u2019s director, artist William Wiebe, tells me that he will, if Lawler\u2019s work sells, split the gallery commission with Kinnane Smith; in this case, the \u201carrangement\u201d with the consignor is art. And the artist is\u2014as Lawler was\u2014a middleman.<\/p>\n

Then, there is Kinnane Smith\u2019s more obvious salute to her methods. He has traced Lawler\u2019s tracings. The act, a reenactment of her re-mediating procedure, seems intended to shore up or test the viability of a vintage, Pictures Generation critical ethos via the techniques of appropriation at its core. Intimately scaled and executed without flair or inflection, the framed inkjet prints (produced in editions of two) hang on the gray slatted siding of a perpendicular wall. With his titles for the pair, Lawler, Arranged at Brookfield Properties, NYC (Photographer Unknown) I & II, 2026, Kinnane Smith hints at what this is all about: why Lawler, why these particular works of hers, why here.<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of Harrison Kinnane Smith\u2019s \u201cTracings and Arrangements,\u201d 2026.<\/p>\n

I had to press for further information and explanation to understand, though. Lawler\u2019s Bulbs (traced) and (Bunny) Sculpture and Painting (traced) are in the art collection of Brookfield Properties, the company that develops and operates the real estate investments of Brookfield Asset Management (a subsidiary of Brookfield Corporation), which holds a 99-year lease on the 39-story tower above Emmelines. While Jared Kushner served as a senior White House adviser in 2018, the skyscraper\u2019s rent\u2014more than a billion dollars\u2014was paid upfront by the Qatari-backed firm, allowing Kushner Companies to avoid default. Brookfield\u2019s 2021 renovation wiped the mark of the beast (at least officially) from the building, whose address is now 660.<\/p>\n

Kinnane Smith provides, as photocopies, two different purchase and sale agreements for his work (each used for one of the two prints in his editions), both mirroring moments in 666\u2019s storied financial and ownership history. One sample document includes a \u201chope certificate\u201d (which, in essence, mimics the Artist\u2019s Reserved Rights Sale and Transfer Agreement<\/a>, enabling artists to profit from secondary market sales). It hearkens back to a part of a contract drawn up in 2011 meant \u201cto prevent the Kushner Companies from defaulting on their January 2007 acquisition by reducing the senior debt owed until such time as the property generated sufficient income.\u201d (No, I don\u2019t totally understand how this works myself.)<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of Harrison Kinnane Smith\u2019s \u201cTracings and Arrangements,\u201d 2026.<\/p>\n

The other, a \u201csale-leaseback and purchase agreement,\u201d makes reference to a pre-Kushner, 1955 arrangement, which, here, means that a buyer will immediately relinquish their Lawler, Arranged at Brookfield Properties print to Emmelines (who is the seller as well as the lessee). The owner would stand to profit from a sale but never be in physical possession of the work\u2014optimal terms for a \u201ccollector\u201d whose interest is purely speculative.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible to get a little lost in the weeds poring over the two agreements, the riddlelike press release, and the \u201cchecklist\u201d that maps a kind of distributed authorship through a provenance of image appropriations, and still appreciate Kinnane Smith\u2019s engagement with the legal and financial instruments of real estate transactions and \u201casset management\u201d in the context of his show\u2019s cool conceptual mise en abyme, his Lawlering of Lawler, his shrinking of her rendering of the mirrored Koons bunny, etc. into compositions smaller than a dollar bill. (I\u2019m told he copied the works from Brookfield\u2019s online index of their art collection, though the links that turn up in my search results are broken.)<\/p>\n

\"\"Harrison Kinnane Smith, Lawler, Arranged at Brookfield Properties, NYC (Photographer Unknown) II, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Emmelines.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the large-scale tracings in the emptied newsstand remain the riveting main event, even as they become the dramatic backdrop for quieter maneuvers. Admirably, endearingly, Kinnane Smith recruits the sphinxian presence (as well as the prestige) of Lawler\u2019s pictures not to one-up them, not to stage a gotcha moment regarding their relationship to Brookfield\u2014to global capital, geopolitics, catastrophic conflicts of interest\u2014but to align himself with her self-implicating practice as well as, more broadly, the provisional aesthetics, cagey affect, and historical priorities of institutional critique.<\/p>\n

What a relief it is really, to write this week about something site-specific, political in the nature of its inquiry rather than in its expressed position. Certainly the Whitney<\/a> has had enough of this stuff, you might conclude, as you descend the Allison and Warren Kanders Stairway after touring this year\u2019s pleasant biennial, which has leaned into its new irrelevance, free from the practitioners of reflexive commentary who once lent the exhibition its edge, the artists who can, luckily I guess, be relied upon to decline the invitation now.<\/p>\n

\"InstallationInstallation view of Harrison Kinnane Smith\u2019s \u201cTracings and Arrangements,\u201d 2026.<\/p>\n

And what a reprieve from disgust, in this twilight of institutions, is Emmelines. There\u2019s a kind of implicit critique, a general symbolic remonstrance, just in its location: literally and figuratively underground, so close and yet a world away from MoMA and its ineluctable association with the sex trafficking of minors\u2014at least in the public imagination\u2014via the spreading, setting stain of board member Leon Black\u2019s detailed presence in the Epstein Files. I hope he\u2019s gone before they open Duchamp. But, if not, Emmelines\u2014given its short but impressive exhibition history\u2014will no doubt offer a conceptually rigorous palate cleanser with its next show. When you enter the subway station off 53rd Street, pay attention, and you\u2019ll find the scrappy enterprise before the turnstile, next to an OMNY vending machine. No need to pay a fare.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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