Allison Kaufman

**March 8th - April 18th**
**Closing Party: April 18th, 6-9pm**
**There will be a video screening of Third Avenue Car Dealerships at 6:30 7:30 and 8:30.**

Installation detail, *Aspirational Vestiges, 2024*

Allison Kaufman: Smooth Confident Perfection explores the performance, hope, and vulnerability experienced by both sellers and consumers in a capitalist society. Recontextualizing and examining overlooked, worn, and gendered marketing materials, her photographs, installation, and video reveal the earnest efforts of salespeople that have faded over time, their degradation communicating the absurdity, impossibility, and slow failure of our societal aspirations. Kaufman considers the fantasy of both the seller and the buyer and where these desires collide: the storefronts of city sidewalks.

Aspirational Vestiges, the centerpiece of the show, is an installation comprised of lightboxes and signage, aimed at women, from small threading and waxing storefronts ubiquitous to New York City. Kaufman photographs the signage in various states of degradation and refabricates the lightboxes as sculptural objects. The work explicitly toys with the seductive nature of commercial signage as documents of perpetual optimism that remain long after the grand openings. The word “vestige” is twofold: either a trace of something that has been lost or an organ that has evolved to be inactive. In taking worn fragmentations of the female body out of context, Kaufman highlights this duality present in the work. Her collection also underscores the erasures and omissions in these materials at large: the full female body, aging, diversity, and the labor behind these storefronts.

Installation detail, *3rd Avenue Car Dealerships,* Video and Photographs, 2018-2024, *Smooth Confident Perfection,* 2024

*3rd Avenue Car Dealerships*, Single-Channel Looped Video with Sound

Across the gallery, the video 3rd Avenue Car Dealerships serves as a counterpoint to the flickering collection of light boxes, showing waving flags against blue skies. Some clips are optimistic and bright with promise, while others show the same flags weathered with time. Kaufman pairs the images with promotional audio clips by car salesmen found on YouTube. The blended speeches are both earnest and insincere, echoing and informing the gender performance at play in other works in the gallery. Like Aspirational Vestiges, the actual object or service being sold is absent from 3rd Avenue Car Dealerships. Both works focus exclusively on the ornamentation of commercialism, highlighting the desire and potential disappointment inherent in both selling and buying.

Installation detail, *3rd Avenue Car Dealerships,* 2018-present

In a smaller gallery within the gallery, a grid of large scale photographs of car dealership flags hover away from the walls and slide around a corner. The colorful, cheap metallic garlands in various states of decay are at once jubilant and tired. Kaufman prints on aluminum, their materiality further emphasizing the phantom presence of cars.

In Big Fish I and II, and Waterfall, Kaufman continues to intervene in archival, functional, and generic imagery that addresses fantasy and performance. Taking photographs of odd photo stand-ins she found at peripheral booths at the NY Boat Show, Kaufman then cuts into these images, juxtaposing them with natural, three-dimensional materials, and rephotographing the assemblages. Big Fish I and II consider the typically masculine ritual of posing with captured or hunted animals and point to the strangeness of these performative vernacular photographs. Waterfall is also a photograph of photographs - scrambled and inverted vistas of vacation destinations found at a restaurant supply store. All of these works play with flatness and depth, and point to the artifice of photography and its role in consumer fantasy.

Elsie Kagan

Shadowtime