Rachel Fäth and Zazou Roddam at Brunette Coleman, London

American neoliberal doctrine has found an ultimate expression in the technopoly of contemporary America - Meta, Pfizer, Dogecoin, and the Department of Government Efficiency. This post-industrial, post-everything condition, now inseparable from a malaise in Western society, began to dominate some decades ago. Francis Irv’s show of work by artists Rachel Fäth (b. 1991, Berlin) and Zazou Roddam (b. 2000, London) (hosted by Brunette Coleman for Condo London) makes no direct reference to any of this; in fact, the show is sparse, minimal and oblique. It is, however, through the material decisions made by the artists that the works not only speak of capitalism, but embed themselves in it.

Fäth’s two sculptures sit directly on the gallery floor, whilst Roddam’s contributes a wall-based work, two framed polaroid photographs, and a small sculpture atop a plinth in the gallery’s side room. In Roddam’s Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 (2024–2025), crystal doorknobs affixed to their relevant painted wooden doors, or rather to the truncated sections of what were originally wooden doors, protrude from perfectly circular holes that have been cut into the front-facing surface of two plexiglass boxes. The boxes are mounted to the wall in a manner reminiscent of a Judd ‘Stack’, out of which the crystal handles jut into the viewer's space. Behind the plexiglass the slices of door form a pile which produces a whimsical effect, whilst acknowledging the weights and shapes of the wood, juxtaposed satisfyingly by the flawless edges and inset screws of the boxes. Both are transparent, but there are subtle differences between the crystal and the plexiglass - the crystal looks hard, old (vintage) and provides an evocative glimmer of late 20th-century affluence, whilst the plexiglass seems recently fabricated, an inert frame derived from minimalist or conceptual art modes. I imagine the former to belong to a category of other crystal glass objects that includes chandeliers and champagne flutes, and envisage the interiors of yachts, expensive real estate portfolios.

The work’s only pronounced colour derives from the coats of paint that the doors have retained from their original function as front doors of houses. I think of handshakes and the opening of a door. And then of a house as the site of the intimacies of daily life and of the intimate calamity of the mortgage crisis of 2008, who’s long shadow is still felt. Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 looks skeletal, like the vertebrae of a spine within a plexiglass body - a nimble metaphor for the methodology she deploys. Her materialist critique reveals the skeletal structure of significance both within the work she makes and with regards to the conditions of its display.

Some of the materials for Lot 2454/ Lot 5152 were acquired at public auction. This nod to the economics of the work is a neat gesture. It functions as an ironic appraisal of the luxury status of the art object as something that could itself end up in an auction lot. Roddam offers a critique of the status of the artwork as autonomous and gently reveals it instead to be historically and economically contingent and part of a context, in this case, the context of the market.

Fäth’s work shares this stringent attention to form. Her materials are selected and reclaimed; heavy, rugged and industrial steel. Sitting side-by-side on the gallery floor, Locker 5 (2024) and Locker 6 (2024) are forms determined by the size constraints of storage lockers, a materialisation of negative space in welded steel. Some of Fäth’s earlier work sourced its steel from a New York production plant (Francis Irv is an NYC gallery). Steel was a chief American industry before globalisation took those factories and jobs elsewhere. Within this glib generalisation are the experiences of countless individuals of grand economic manoeuvrings. To intuit these poetically, as textures, is to jump between the general and the personal. The scrap steel is not, significantly, in its raw form; it is post-industrial, after the fact. The surface of one work is rusted in places, indicating the chemical entropy that takes place when the metal is left to the elements. There is an association here with industrial decline, alluded to in the colloquialism ‘rust belt’.

Isabelle Frances McGuire’s Year Zero at The Renaissance Society, Chicago.

Isabelle McGuire has given us an America in tripartite form. Inside her show Year Zero at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, a life-sized recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace cabin, whose ‘real’ equivalent (Kentucky’s ‘Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park’) is itself a facsimile cabin, alongside two slightly undersized figures of Santa Claus and Jesus, who prostrate on wood-and-dirt-mound pedestals. These cultural figures’ apparent exhumation, however, feels almost entirely depoliticized, positing them in the press release as “‘revisiting the past, re-animating old models, or re-wilding familiar symbols”. This seems like a poetic way to say that you’re picking and choosing from a cultural consciousness that you know will be shared but defining it as active engagement. I am more inclined to feel that “re-wilding” is predominantly passive: a languorously ironic presentation of referents, successfully bolstered by confident and considered choices of material and scale. It does not share the high buzz that McGuire’s more directly funny work exudes - a child’s call of duty cosplay and animatronic baby Yoda at King’s Leap, SuperBaby2(Unmanned) {“The Child”, “Reborn”} (2023) spring to mind. But the eerier tone (the Lincoln house approximates the haunted house) provides visual dividends for a show of empty spaces and characters to be projected onto, even vampirised ones. I enjoy work that pokes at open-ended interpretation, and there are lots of threads to tug, but don’t tell us to look out for it in the accompanying text. Reticence works far better when simply shown, not didactically spelt out.

The Renaissance Society occupies the odd position of being Chicago’s closest approximation of the Kunsthalle format, geared toward commissioned work by living artists. TRS has shown Ghislaine Leung and Aria Dean - always leaning towards reasonably reticent content which balloons to gorge on its own context, for better or worse, under the guises of various forms of sculpture and new media practices, with a yearly-ish dense yet star-studded group show. This is fine and usually stands out in Chicago, not only due to its usually high quality, but by a relative dearth of that form of contemporaneity’ in other art spaces. Given the literal academic backdrop of the space (on the UChicago campus), all the vitrine installations in the hallway vaguely blended in with the incessant postering of doors and walls you see if you climbed the four flights up to the show. Supplementary material, choices for how you might approach the work in the main space, completely separated from the grist of the exhibition. It sucked because McGuire’s sole video in this, Frankenstein in the Underworld (2024) shown in a vitrine, was fucked-up and really good. It firmly illuminated a strain of body-mod which runs through the show. The two disinterred figures are qualified as “bodies printed from medical CT scans of anonymous women” in the accompanying text and fit nicely with McGuire’s previous relation to kitbashing (creating new models from an assortment of different parts) and video game culture.

The show poster, Depo Provera (2024) a work in itself, listed on the checklist - which I don’t think I’ve seen before - shows a staged photoshoot of McGuire injecting her mother’s behind. It was named after a dubiously effective hormonal birth control her mother had been taking while pregnant with McGuire. This oddly heart-warming personal history complicates the previous historical referents. But, when combined with the specificity of the CT scans and the exclusively male personae in the work, spins a discussion around the agencies of differently gendered bodies. Year Zero (alt-history, rebirth, cycles, sublimation, etc.) is a satisfying show, and at its base has a tonal consistency and specificity that I very much appreciate, even though that was exactly what I expected. More of this in Chicago, I think.