The Brooklyn Rail

Perhaps you, like me, know Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo better as Puppies Puppies, the pseudonym-cum-persona that the artist crafted in 2010. Puppies Puppies has historically ventriloquized, masked, and absented herself, both in the context of white-cube installations and performances and in the durational performance of being Puppies Puppies. Troubling systems of meaning and value that seem to feed on artists’ identities, she has operated via proxies who conduct studio visits and take interviews on her behalf. Her performances have found her (or paid actors posing as her) playing the part of a living sculpture in readymade costumes, giving uncanny undercurrents to iconic figures like Gollum and Lady Liberty. As Puppies Puppies underwent a gender transition, overt references to her embodied identity began to materialize in her work: from a show in which she slept in the gallery with her then-partner, taping her estrogen pills to the wall before leaving in the morning, to an installation featuring a headstone for her deadname and an epistolary press release signed with her new name, Jade. “It meant something very different to hide as a trans woman,” Kuriki-Olivo, who is of Taíno and Japanese descent, said in a 2021 interview.

For Nothing New, her current exhibition at the New Museum, Kuriki-Olivo recreated her bedroom in the institution’s glass-walled lobby gallery. (She is living between the gallery and her nearby apartment for the show’s three-month run.) The artist can be observed in the museum display—though she can activate a temporary glass-fogging mechanism when desired—or via a nearby four-quadrant security monitor that livestreams her activities in both locales. Nothing New explores competing desires for visibility and concealment at a time when everyone—the camgirl, the social media poster, the Googler—is, to some extent, being surveilled in their bedroom. It foregrounds the reality that trans people in particular are closely monitored and discursively obsessed-over, mired in a painful paradox in which trans visibility and representation exist alongside anti-trans legislation and violence. Here, Kuriki-Olivo is not the only one put on display: there is palpable discomfort among museumgoers on the other side of the glass, whom her project casts as lurkers, oglers, or avoidants.

Kuriki-Olivo’s transposed bedroom is buttressed by two garden installations, all behind the same glass partition. One side features a torii—a gate denoting sacred ground in Shinto architecture, and a reference to the artist’s mother—that opens onto a rock garden. The other comprises six potted cannabis plants—the maximum number New Yorkers can legally grow in their homes—under grow lights along with a gridded arrangement of her brain MRIs. (In 2010, the artist had a malignant brain tumor removed; CBD facilitated her recovery.) Acting as a framing device, these supplementary autobiographical vignettes code the bedroom as an interior space imbued with spiritual, psychological, and physiological meaning. Nestled between them, the otherwise unremarkable boudoir is virtually all green, a color that Kuriki-Olivo prizes for its blended nature and treats as a readymade. The hue pervades the bed’s headboard and ruched coverlet; faux fur walls and plush area rugs; desk and seating; Akari table lamp and overhead Japanese lanterns; mini fridge with accompanying snacks; clothing hanging on a rack; shelving with its knick knacks; and an outward-facing LED sign announcing who is inside the room. (Kuriki-Olivo occasionally has sanctioned visitors.) Each time green is repeated it is tantamount to saying Jade’s name, a name all the more lovely for having been self-bestowed. In forming a backdrop, the color also conjures up green screens: a means by which to visualize oneself in another setting, if only in fantasy. Like art bleeding into life, the green spills over into what is normally the museum café. The café is stocked with gallons of green multipurpose cleaner and mass-produced food and beverages in green containers, along with a green computer screen and marquee-style quotes from trans activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

The first time I saw Nothing New, the artist reclined in her bed on her phone, occasionally facing the device outward, as her guest projected a “Power Half-Hour for Gaza” from a laptop at the desk. The glass intermittently fogged. When I returned another day, the artist was nowhere to be seen. It was unclear whether her body or a careful arrangement of pillows formed the stock-still, human-sized lump under the duvet, and two quadrants of the livestream (recording real and ersatz bedrooms) were nonfunctional, the visuals supplanted by fields of neon green. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had sabotaged the surveillance system, hacking herself a brief respite from conditions so inhospitable to human life.

The unconscionable scrutiny directed at those who, like Kuriki-Olivo, are trans women of color or sex workers (sex work supplements Kuriki-Olivo’s income as an artist) is indeed “nothing new.” Likewise, the exhibition’s premise is “nothing new” in that a number of artists have previously blurred the lines between the gallery and the bedroom, among them Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, and Tehching Hsieh (and Kuriki-Olivo herself, in the aforementioned 2017 exhibition in which she slept in a gallery). Kuriki-Olivo takes a looser, less stringent approach than these predecessors as she navigates the complex push-pull of visibility from her positionality.