The opening salvo of Sin Fatigue, Nadine Sarriedine gallery’s inaugural show, is a fortune cookie message rendered in textile by Erin M. Riley: “You never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems,” along with a selection of lucky numbers. The message serves as an apt mission statement for a gallery trying to carve out its digital and physical footprint in the downtown art scene, as well as this show in particular, which explores the creation and performance of selfhood across the motley work of 13 artists. (“13,” curiously, is not one of Riley’s lucky numbers.)
A number of the works in the exhibition relate to technology. Damon Zucconi’s digital paintings deploy algorithms to weave together sundry disarticulated and abstracted government document images to create four portraits of spectral female faces shrouded in light. The works confront how human likeness was historically recognized as facsimile, a composite of the subject’s idealized self and the painter’s sympathy or honesty, and has since become simultaneously a far more rigid legal category and also a site of agency due to digital tools and the internet. Alex Ito’s “witness” (2024), in which a dynamic central panel of silver nitrate chrome and oxidized iron powder shifts and changes with time and its surroundings, also speaks to the social media age. This reflective core draws viewers in, while dark panels flanking it bear the imprints of neon hands that recall the way flesh might appear on a heatmap, the mark of someone trying to but unable to enter. While we’re drawn to these reflections of ourselves, believing they connect us, it suggests, digital imagery often masks real-world conflict and division rather than bridging it.
Other works foreground identity and performance. “Ricochet” (2024) by Jesus Hilario-Reyes merges his dual identities as artist and DJ. The lightbox installation, draped in black electrical cables, houses hundreds of miniature black Jab Jab figures from Latin American carnival tradition. These figures face a stage where strobe lights pulse in sync with a 15-minute soundtrack, translating Hilario-Reyes’s perspective from behind the DJ booth, where individual dancers gradually blur into one pulsing mass of energy.
Laura Anderson Barbata’s “King Olokun, (Intervention: Ocean Blues)” (2018), meanwhile, translates the power of a sea deity into what recalls a drag performance costume. Named for the Yoruba ruler of the sea, the ensemble gleams like bioluminescent ocean life: A crown of blue fronds rises like seaweed toward the sky, topped by a fringed blue lampshade-like headpiece, while a blue satin cape sparkles with iridescent circular and talon-shaped sequins and balloon string fringe. Just as bioluminescence illuminates the ocean’s hidden depths, the costume spotlights the growing crisis of climate change much like a drag performance might satirize social issues.
Relatedly, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter’s “A Protective Style (A Spell Cast on The Ocean floor)” (2023) rests on the entry floor, presenting a circle of braided hair that seems to float in either deep ocean waters or a swirling night sky. Using a complex mix of materials — acrylic, paper, gouache, glitter, black Tourmaline, obsidian, crochet box braids, LED lights, and vinyl cuts — the piece draws parallels between hair’s protective role and a spiritual shield, suggesting both adornment and armor.
Sin Fatigue brings together artists whose works speak from society’s edges, finding unexpected connections in their diverse perspectives. From Ito’s shifting mirrors to Hilario-Reyes’s pulsing crowds, from Anderson Barbata’s oceanic drag to Sikelianos-Carter’s protective hair spells, each piece weaves together themes of identity, protection, and transformation — suggesting that power often flows from society’s margins to its center.
Sin Fatigue continues at Salma Sarriedine gallery (116 Elizabeth Street Floor 3, Lower East Side, Manhattan), through February 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
