The Brooklyn Rail

In this resonant and metaphysically charged group exhibition, artists channel the ancient power of mythic storytelling to viscerally, politically, and somatically plunge us into it. Feeding Our Demons, curated by Hovey Brock, features work by Sarah Grass, Alexandra Hammond, Eva Davidova, and collaborators Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow. Their works function less as discrete objects and more as active, even restless, portals to other worlds. Each invites the audience into uneasy encounters with the deeply personal, social, and psychic terrain of our current crises. Here, the climate catastrophe, political unrest, and the economic precarity we are currently living through are brought into view without aestheticizing catastrophes. The works on view embody, perform, and transmit their affective force through images, narrative, form, and interaction.

Sarah Grass offers subversively enchanting images featuring delicate linework and muted tones that give rise to bold explorations of human consciousness. She conjures beings that inhabit liminal zones between play and pleasure, depicted in strange scenes that combine abject bodies with a surreal humor. The result is a visual language that revels in a paradox between carnivalesque and contemplative, inviting viewers into a delirious theater where meaning is mutable and moral resolution is absent. Alexandra Hammond’s disquieting landscapes trouble the preconceived binaries of nature and culture, reframing the natural world as an extension of human life and activity, rather than a passive backdrop or object of our gaze. In these oil paintings, intimate views show us that our being is tied to, and in fact, inscribed in the more-than-human terrain where agency is shared and woven together.

In Eva Davidova’s VR work Garden for Drowning Descendant (2022), viewers enter an uncanny dreamworld populated with dancers and floating objects. The work engages in a speculative dramaturgy of posthuman figures. They are ambiguous, unsettling, and profoundly embodied. In this immersive space, movement becomes a method of inquiry, but improvised, prompted, and digitally augmented gestures enact a tension between autonomy and control. Through this oneiric grammar, Davidova stages a meditation on displacement, surveillance, and the dream of escape. Here, the grotesque and the sublime intertwine, and the only logic that remains is the drive for survival.

The Iceberg is a collaborative interactive project by Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow. It takes the form of an oversized gameboard and imaginatively illustrated cards, inviting visitors to sit together on the floor in a playful gesture toward climate discourse. Drawing on the visual and interpretive logics of tarot cards, the work comprises four suits: Heroes and Villains, Profit from Loss, Thoughts, and Allegories. Participants make card selections to navigate the terrain of seemingly unrelated and sometimes contradictory elements and form connections between them. This inevitably yields absurd responses and reveals the rhizomatic nature of symbolic, ecological, and ideological life under late capitalism. Enlarged recreations of the cards are printed on metal plates and displayed in a grid on the walls surrounding players, prompting parallel participation among gallery visitors. The Iceberg operates as a clever provocation and a speculative tool for contemplating and talking through the dense entanglements of our present moment and foregrounds uncertainty as a necessary mode of discovery and knowledge production.

Engaging with these works involves a confrontation with the “demons” of climate anxiety, ecological collapse, and techno-capitalist obsession. Once we get past the initial shock, we are encouraged to sit with and feel the weight of their haunting effects. The drawings of a shape-shifting dachshund, the moods of sentient landscapes, the divinatory structure of a climate crisis-inflected card game, and an existential VR experience all reorient perception toward a deeper ontological complexity. For curator Brock, Feeding Our Demons enacts a philosophical praxis akin to Lama Tsultrim Allione’s reimagining of the tantric ritual of Chöd, a practice of radical empathy and psychic transformation. In this way, the exhibition insists on an embodied form of knowledge, where sensation precedes cognition, and where art does not resolve contradiction but makes it livable.