The Brooklyn Rail

Brandon Ndife and Louis Osmosis’s two-person show at Amanita consists of several sculptural assemblages. The structures are often positioned edgewise with shimmering bric-a-brac, meretricious decoration, and garish frippery, including tinsel chains, glitter-glue residues, and vinyl ivy creepers. The most striking works on display are those that effectively meld these kitsch ephemera with conspicuously particular connotative imagery. These include Ndife’s resin-coated, rusted, and organza-laced arboreal totem, Group Huddle (for unknown) (2026), and Osmosis’s colorful polyurethane window blinds—Grey’s Foreclosure, Red’s Foreclosure, and Silver’s Foreclosure (all 2024–2026)—whose anfractuous, oleaginous laths-cum-logs lapse and cake into one another, as if they’ve thickened over time. The aforementioned “striking” quality has far less to do with the visual beauty than it does with these constructions’ inviting oddity.

Indeed, while the oddity is enough to draw one in, it is not what anchors the artists’ best work. Admittedly, identifying a proper throughline between the formally and materially diverging works is something of a difficult task, all the more so given that several of the other works on view appropriate recognizable indices. This is most markedly apparent in Osmosis’s steel doublets, Centrifugal Pickle #4 (Fly Trap) and Centrifugal Pickle #5 (Fly Trap) (both 2026)—a pair of wending scissor gates suspended from the ceiling and blazoned with oversized makeshift Rolex clocks. The metal cross bars are ribboned with an erotic print in the case of #4 and a wildlife photo of two pandas chewing bamboo in #5. In both instances, the grille is shot through with striped, colorful fillet-bands. These works contain the word “pickle” in their title by dint of the fiasco-describing idiom “stuck in a pickle.” Although the punning is cheeky, transmogrification from the purely verbal to the resolutely visual remains a lossy endeavor (a problem familiar to those who have attempted ekphrastic writing). This is why the most compelling and coherent artists who traffic in punning are those like Robert Indiana, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, and Mel Bochner—none of whom entirely abdicate the written word when endeavoring linguistic flourishes.

One could, anchoring the exhibition in the “Centrifugal Pickle” series’ clock motif, readily cite a platitude about temporality, averring that the show’s connective tissue is part and parcel with the aging process manifest in most of the works. After all, the trees are hoary, husk-like edifices and the “Foreclosure” window apertures include a runoff finish down the wall—an air conditioning-imprinted byproduct that often outlasts renters and homeowners. Were one to venture such an interpretive gloss, propounding concepts the likes of “temporality” and “aging,” they might also allude to Ndife’s glowing claret headboard, Red Devil Cake (2026), whose surface is impressed and looped through with faux ivy garland leaves, two empty photo frames positioned atop its upper rail mantle. Yet this would amount to asserting a shallow truism, as such a reading would at once reduce objects indicating the passage of time—such as Ndife’s hardened fuliginous saplings—to instruments of time-telling, like Osmosis’s prodigious Rolexes. Category mistakes aside, it would also disregard why it is that Osmosis has feigned a “Rolex” clock rather than an unbranded grandfather clock. Worse yet, it could hardly make sense of the anthropomorphized spermatozoon, Mascot for the Cold (2026)—so titled due to the smoking form’s swaddled scarf—or the recessed central panel, Black and Gold (2026), sheathed in gold tinsel.

Perhaps the search for univocal meaning is folly, but I maintain that there is one. It broadly operates on the material-formal register, as dross garlands, foil fringes, and glitter spangles recurrently fringe what are otherwise contained sculptural forms. In Mascot for the Cold, the additive parergon is a silver cigarette perched in the spermatozoon’s cased mouth. With Group Huddle (Satellite) (2026), cables sleep in and around the squatted waxy log. With the “Foreclosure” series, the supplement belongs to the sparked tributaries that, as noted above, rill down the window-structure’s bottom edge; Osmosis has accentuated the drainage discharge with sparkles.

In several cases, the adjunct element does little to facilitate material-thematic continuity. For example, in Group Huddle (Satellite), the snaking white cables visually and thematically interrupt the cragged stump’s mossy bark surface. Again, one could figure some all-too-abstract thematic motif—related, for instance, to a constructed dichotomy of the built and the natural, or the mechanical and the organic—but this hardly provides us with a proper meaning. But in those select instances where the artists facilitate continuity out of ornament, the works are far more triumphant. Semi-diaphanous, umber wired ribbons are tied around the tree block in Group Huddle (for unknown), knotted into a bandana wreath towards the top. It is tempting to take the golden metallic star pattern to be nothing but a flourish, as in the Satellite sister-sculpture’s case; but, upon closer consideration, one is reminded of the practice of using flagging tape to mark boundaries and trails in a forest. Here, we find Ndife coalescing strands of meaning despite the optical polarity—a productive dialectic rather than an unsettled dichotomy. That this synthesis belongs to the connotative facets means that the artist can retain what appears to be a genuine commitment to gleaming cheap finishes—tinsel, glitter, and gaudy Rolex faces—without foregoing meaning-embodiment. Osmosis is similarly successful in his “Foreclosure” series because the weeping brown watermarks recall the vertical condensation streaking common to overtired AC units in run-down domiciles. By culling particular images rather than abstractions like “temporality,” the element of nostalgia, too, is inventively emboldened.