The Brooklyn Rail

I’m sitting cross-legged on the bright pink floor of Adriana Farmiga’s Index, at Marisa Newman Projects. The installation contains a large set of marine-plywood cut forms resting atop the pink paint that coats the floor and the lower part of the walls. What first seems to be an indecipherable jumble of playful, curvilinear forms soon resolves into a series of human-scale, upturned emoji masks with openings cut for oversized eyes and popsicle stick supports pitched at incline angles.

From my vantage point, humorous combinations quickly emerge: a skull obscures a cat; a lion peeks out from behind a ghost; the Statue of Liberty leans against Mickey Mouse while an otter blockades them all into a corner. Caught between play and sociopolitical dissent, the sculptures by Farmiga evoke the craft masks of childhood as much as discarded protest posters.

Initial impressions of the work include soaring reproaches of the faceless avatars we create online, more pointedly how often we mask ourselves, and what we lose when we exist behind layers of abstraction. But, opposing this clarity is a tension—between the pink and the blankness, between passivity and potential—that never fully resolves.

The unsettling simplicity of the masks makes them feel more like shields than symbols. Between the laminated layers of birch plywood; the organic fights the machine, public contends with the private, protest meets passivity, and obfuscation confronts visibility. As Sianne Ngai outlines in her prophetic essay “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” artists who successfully activate the subversive potential of “cuteness” often co-opt postwar aesthetics of powerlessness to transform the infantilized into the uncanny. Much of the labor involved in Farmiga’s installation seems aimed at achieving this defamiliarization. In the works’ unpainted, hollow state, the emojis are stripped of their once steadfast cuteness and become perversely appealing agents of interrogation, reevaluation, and threat.

As the American-born child of Ukrainian refugees who fled starvation, assassination, and the war-torn displacement camps of Eastern Europe, Farmiga built a world around digesting opposing cultures from an early age. Perhaps this heritage helps explain her deftness for reconstitution? It certainly offers an ideological bridge to guide the work into the self-consumptive lineage where it belongs: anthropophagy. Index riffs upon the strategies of practitioners like Lygia Clark and Tarsila do Amaral as it cannibalizes formal complexity and popular symbology to physiologically regurgitate the viewer.

The “Baker-Miller pink” that Farmiga used to paint the floor and walls was originally deployed in the 1980s across prisons and mental institutions to sedate restless populations. When this history combined with the horizontal, painted boundary that recalls artist Ryan Gander’s theory of the “passivity line,” I found myself surprisingly disarmed. As if the seductive pull I had felt towards the ground was the result of an invisible, yet crushing weight of the Pepto-Bismol pink flood waters around me—as if the masks had already been partially digested and rounded by the corrosive forces of the vitriol that circumambulates the web.

Yearning for a “key” to the swirling index ahead of me, I turn toward the back room of the gallery to find an intimate set of three still-life watercolors titled: Inventory (Red), Inventory (Yellow), and Inventory (Blue). In each work, seven objects are rendered in meticulous detail. These include a cocktail umbrella, a gingham napkin, an injection molded plastic dustpan, and a bottle of perfume, among many others. As the only piece in the show that dares cross the pink border, I first understand the works to be a tangential respite from the psychological demands of the main installation. But in typical Farmiga fashion, the underlying point/counterpoint logic is undeniable. These works confound the viewer’s already disoriented understanding against maddeningly unambiguous objects. They are whimsical, grouped by color and resolved to painstaking clarity.

While much of Farmiga’s previous work has pinpointed tenderness and humor in the realm of assemblage, this exhibition is emblematic of a deepened trust in her abilities as both a facilitator and instigator. Ultimately the show’s strength is its ability to wager jubilation against a prescient warning: the liberal pacification that has shifted violence from the physical world into online realms is far from innocuous. In this digital dystopia, cute emojis become stand-ins for complex political debate; round forms and calming colors attract attention but conceal unseen violence; and consumerist detritus is compressed into a flattened form. In an index there should be no east or west, no foes to conquer, and certainly no moralizing judgements to be made.