ARIA DEAN
LIZ DESCHENES
DAVID DIAO
HARUN FAROCKI
RACHEL HARRISON
CRAIG KALPAKJIAN
CAROLYN LAZARD
LEE LOZANO
KARA WALKER

Deep Play brings together a multigenerational group of artists who share a structuralist tack, using formal means to dismantle the systems that scaffold our lived reality. Across painting and sculpture, video, cut-paper collage, and cameraless photography, their work indexes recent methods to expose and upend art’s means of production—implicating the checkered conditions of life under capitalism in its wake. Employing documentary candor or gallows humor, poetic dissonance or an ethics of care, the assembled artists mount trenchant critiques of the levers of societal control: from automation and surveillance to racial animus and the carceral state, the antiseptic voids of virtual space to the material dreck of industrial consumption. The exhibition’s title is lifted from a 2007 video by Harun Farocki, which urges viewers to look beneath the surface of mass-media events of contrived consensus. Deep Play thus furrows our perceptions to counter a sense of totalizing hold, stressing the fractures in the current order to imply a new way forward.