Omnipresence

Peggy Ahwesh, Ei Arakawa and Miho Hatori, Ericka Beckman, KP Brehmer, Olga Chernysheva, Selina Grüter and Michèle Graf, Jason Hirata, Ho Rui An, Alan Ruiz, Carey Young, Jessica Vaughn, Constantina Zavitsanos

Bright white LED lights that never go out. Sidewalk fencing painted an all-too-natural shade of “hunter green.” The soul and feelings of a worker plotted in geometric patterns of color. An escape hatch with no exit. This exhibition presents a diverse range of critical strategies that render the infrastructure, media, and iconography of authority in the lived everyday. Through architectural intervention, sculpture, performance, and the moving image, the works displayed explore how control becomes an environmental condition, how "Omnipresence"—the name of New York City’s new strategy for a heightened saturation of police presence—calls for hyper-vigilance. In Kafka’s words, “there are only control agencies.”

Curated by Elisa R. Linn, Joseph Lubitz, Ellen Pavey, and Manabu Yahagi, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP).

This exhibition is a collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and The Kitchen. Curatorial participants of the ISP are designated as Helena Rubinstein Fellows in recognition of the long standing support of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. Support for the Independent Study Program is provided by Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa, The Capital Group Charitable Foundation, The New York Community Trust, and the Whitney Contemporaries through their annual Art Party Benefit. Endowment support is provided by Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Fund of the Communities Foundation of Texas, the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation and the Helena Rubinstein Foundation.