Cigarettes, Ceramics, and Curatorial Chaos: We Went To SPRING/BREAK’s “Secret Show”

Deric Carner (L), Mariana Peragallo (Lamp), and Taylor Lee Nicholson (ceramics and astroturf... including ceramic cigarette butts.)

Michael Anthony Farley And Whitney Kimball, BMORE Art, May 22, 2023

What’s on view: A “homecoming” show of over 300 works by artists in the SPRING/BREAK orbit. Salon-style, primarily painting and ceramics with loose themes, including: cigarettes, beer, Bushwick nostalgia, neon patterns, floral ceramics, horse paintings, attempts to expose government and corporate corruption. Works are loosely grouped in four rooms and a hallway of a former orphan asylum turned parochial school turned residential building in New York’s NoLIta where SPRING/BREAK first exhibited.

Whitney: SO MANY CIGS. Wall-to-wall cigs. From candy-sized to pool noodle-scale, this show contained so many depictions of cigarettes that every tubular object started to resemble a cigarette. You are a cigarette. I am a cigarette. This is the show of one thousand cigarettes.