Brandon Ndife unsettles distinctions between daily life and its surrealist lining. Organic shapes are nested within sculptural shells that resemble domestic furniture, hand-built to evoke the mass-produced items that order our private lives. Drawers and bureaus drift in suspended states of ripening and rot, as artificial vegetation threatens to overtake the built environment. With elements cast in resin or modeled in foam and painted in a sly trompe l’oeil, Ndife’s low-slung altars are rife with near-alchemical transformations. The encroaching foliage also points up the social dimension of nature itself: his botanicals favor Indigenous plants whose histories are entangled with human migration. Cast tubers and gourds read as exotic shapes to some and as staple foods to others, with a material uncanny that nods to broader systems of uneven distribution.

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Ndife’s exhibition design embeds the works in a theatrical space that recalls a city street, with sculptures perched on a cement curb as if discarded—now vulnerable to weathering and prying eyes. Yet that exposure lends them a cryptic agency, like relics that summon their own past lives. This sprawling environment is also strewn with “decoys” Ndife has placed among the artworks, highlighting the hierarchies we tacitly assign to all that we encounter. Those questions of value resurface in the exhibition’s title, as Clearance denotes what has been marked down because left unsold. In Ndife’s hands, objects positioned as “jettisoned and unclaimed” become conduits to more structural exclusions, and their wild growth alludes to a political order that fosters rampant surplus and deprivation alike.

A group of drawings offer a more classical counterpoint to the sculptures. Dusky pastels depict household furnishings intact—still in a state of unsullied coherence before entropy sets in. That anachronism only heightens the temporal unmooring of Ndife’s assemblages, which appear like remnants of a distant past or envoys from a dystopian future.