5 Exhibitions to Visit During The Armory Show

‘Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here’ | 52 Walker | 21 June – 14 September

This was a summer in which every queer bar suddenly had a back room; in which the concept of ‘joy’ was deployed to hawk neoliberalism; in which the Supreme Court said you could only sleep indoors. Meanwhile, Diamond Stingily transformed 52 Walker into a warren of private places you could sneak a little look inside, at most, and often not even that. Rickety closet doors, scrunched or flung open, reveal about an arm’s length of great beyonds, populated by bath towels stiff from various uses, stacks of newspapers, bricks. A group of baseball bats stands ready in one closet, provoking rumination on the kind of games the imagined resident might anticipate playing. Elsewhere, graceful curtains frame fields of Derek Jarman blue: a reminder that a window can be a wall. Here, interior design is slippery, sui generis, coded, in charge, making rooms in which to hide and escape.

‘Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation’ | Whitney Museum of American Art | 24 August – 5 January

Mark Armijo McKnight’s large-scale gelatin silver prints capture landscapes in which the sun fucks valleys, men make mountains of each other’s bodies and the grand legacy of black and white photography seems to brown, and lavender, in frame. A new show of Armijo McKnight’s work, tightly edited by Drew Sawyer and installed in the museum’s free lobby, plants several of the artist’s photos like flags of where he has been. It also offers a few signposts indicating where he might be headed. ‘Decreation’ includes a new 16mm film, Without a Song (solo ii) (2024) – in which unseen operators stage György Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (Symphonic Poem, 1962), a composition for metronomes, near Armijo McKnight’s maternal homeland in the badlands of New Mexico – as well as Duet (2024), a set of heavy limestone seats, their faces etched with sundials so sitters are ass-to-ass with the passing of time, sun shining from their behinds.

‘R. Jamin: Temperance’ | David Peter Francis | 5 September – 19 October

R. Jamin once worked as a caretaker for a colony of flightless doves who made their home on the roof of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Jamin’s tricky explorations of the mysterious are grounded in the melancholy poetics of this flock, birds which – freed from their species’ defining, lofty characteristic – gravitated toward an archive of the unclassifiable. In one corner of the show, a sculpture (Valentine IV, all works 2024) features a feather floating atop a spear; a wall-mounted work in graphite, Foundation Pit, depicts two birds devising an airborne kiss, beak-to-beak. Jamin’s skilled draughtsmanship is on display in The Tunguska Event, a drawing inspired by an explosion in early 20th century Siberia – a work that both captures the power of the impact event and is an event in itself – while her imaginative chops are evident in the way steel spears repeat throughout the installation without becoming dull.

‘Ethan James Green: Bombshell’ | Kapp Kapp | 5 September – 26 October

Ethan James Green follows up his 2019 monograph Young New York, which focused on millennials, with a fresh body of work on an older theme: ‘the feminine’. Over the long, weird summer of 2021, those days of redefining how to take care of each other and learning who will keep us safe, the photographer began inviting close friends and collaborators into his studio, mostly one-on-one, to play with wigs and fashions of their choosing. The results line the gallery walls, and each in its own way seizes the means of producing feminine glamour. Some of his subjects – Hari Nef and Martine Gutierrez, for instance – have already established ways of making themselves seen in the world, while others are currently better known behind the scenes. No matter: Green frames each in the full flower of their charisma. Here, a star is not only what you are, but what you do.

‘Srijon Chowdhury: Tapestry’ | P·P·O·W | 6 September – 19 October

Srijon Chowdhury’s debut at P·P·O·W just might be the most spectacular show of paintings in a very crowded season. The exhibition assembles a nervy collection of oil-on-linen work which manages to synthesize pre-Raphaelite nature worship, Islamic and Buddhist architecture, the gothic shiver-thrills of Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake, and the last 400 years of innovation in oil-painting techniques. Chowdhury seems to be able to do almost anything, and here he does everything, from pointillist fields of flowers that shimmer with LSD intensity to long strokes that ripple like plumes of air. His painted bodies are astonishing, rendered with an adoration that honours our anatomy without syphoning off all the strangeness. This isn’t so much body horror as body wonder. A bravura five-panel piece, Mouth (Divine Dance) (2022), dominates the space, with lips (themselves formed from figures in previous work) parting like portals into a red, wet mouth of raving devil figures, their potential kitsch annihilated by the infectious joy of their dance. Seeing is believing.

^{Main image: Srijon Chowdhury, Dean Dreaming (detail), 2024, oil on linen, 76 × 102 cm. Courtesy: Srijon Chowdhury and P·P·O·W, New York}