December 2-30, 2023
15 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002

Bahnhof is pleased to present The Invisible Malaise, a group show of three artists who concentrate on notions and textures of labor in their practice. Greg Allen-Müller (b. 1973), Dominic Palarchio (b. 1995) and Lauren Seiden (b. 1981) all work on the intersection of found object, industrial production, and manual labor. Their approaches, however, differ significantly, as do their backgrounds.

There is no shortage of futurological speculation on the future without work, a fully automated everyday that will free humans from taxing, repetitive efforts to maintain everyday routines. The question remains, however, of all the surplus value that labor creates. Will it go into securing a Universal Basic Income for every world citizen? Or melt into air? Art-making is also subject to the many paradoxes of the workless future. Its value often rests on evocative power that transforms the visible world either back to its original innocence, exempt from direct instrumentalisation, or to memorial significance of shared pasts.  

Against the background of increasingly volatile labor laws and incessant attempts at unionizing in North America’s many industries, the exhibition on the physicality and surface of work is a timely reminder of all the effort that goes into sustaining our built environment. The artists in The Invisible Malaise treat labor as medium, arriving at objects and sculptures that reference their original uses while conjuring visions of emotional attachments and personal history that accompany each fissure and notch.

Greg Allen-Müller was born in borderline-rural Texas to a variety of tasks and tools required for maintenance and repair. After studying sculpture, he moved to New York and concentrated on a practice that combines convention display architecture, ready-made, and a variety of technical procedures. He dislikes the professional designation of an ‘artist,’ choosing instead to call himself ‘just a maker of objects.’ In his latest sculptures, presented in The Invisible Malaise, Allen-Müller embraces his working-class background and approaches form as action, blurring the line between the object and the tool. Signs of wear and tear unveil the material frictions that accompany hard labor and the lifespan of an instrument.

Dominic Palarchio comes from a family of car mechanics. He is interested in all kinds of industrial and natural patina, which accrues through repeated use or dejection stemming from obsolescence. His objects, in Palarchio’s own words, reek of working-class fatigue. They highlight the indetermination, or the inexactness, of time as something psychologically taxing, accompanied by malaise. Two of his works in the show employ oil lamp elements to stage a kind of vigil for the everyday. Another sculpture substitutes burn for freeze and is a faithful recreation of a ground rod—used to redirect lightning— covered in sculpted icicles. The piece poses the risk and precarity of the utility’s degradation, in this case from natural elements.

Lauren Seiden is preoccupied with invisible labor. She meticulously covers found objects — mops, newspapers, and the like — in pencil, so that the finished works acquire a metallic sheen of frayed steel. Subject to a neurological disorder that sometimes disables movement in her hands, Seiden views her work as a persistent questioning of repetitive, at times painful, action of drawing on an almost industrial scale. In The Invisible Malaise, Seiden is featured with a combination of marble, mop, and drawing, a sculpture made of thick paper, and an object that is formed out of old newspapers. Her attention to labor connects Seiden’s practice to legendary New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s lifelong project of ‘maintenance’ as art.
                                                                                                                                   - Valentin Diaconov