The Brooklyn Rail

I had a funny moment outside NOON Projects in Los Angeles as I realized where this exhibition’s title came from. The street itself is bathed in sunlight courtesy of a long east-bound walkway and good old California weather, but that’s not it. The truth is that the small gallery on Chung King Road used to belong to “WIN SUN COMPANY Jade & Jewelry,” before the W fell off. Just about everything with this exhibition, a duet between Portland-based artists Kristan Kennedy and Marcus Fischer, emerges from a profound sense of coincidence and circumstance, both within Kennedy and Fischer’s highly intentional explorations of duration and resilience and in ways, like the sign, that could only be attributed to forces beyond our control. The result is a deft balance of open-armed playfulness and careful obfuscation, companionship and vulnerability, magnified by an honest awareness of the works’ inevitable fragility.

Kennedy’s paintings, all from 2026, begin on unstretched linen before being put through a painterly gauntlet: they’re dyed, stained with clarified butter, drawn-on, and thrown through the laundry in any order as many times as is necessary to create a hypnotic sense of pre-existence that’ll ring familiar to punks and wooks in the room as evocative of a well-worn touring garment. In the cluster to the gallery’s immediate left, the 30-by-24-inch S.N.I.S.W.T. stitches a multicolored back patch to a ring of near-brutalist grey strokes, while the smaller I.N.S.T.D.T.Y.H.M.M.D. frames bleached white splotches like half-painted easter eggs atop a frayed pocket of McDonald’s yellow on scratched-up indigo. In the low-hung, vertically-barred T.E.A.O.O.T., woozy umber dye spots form micro-images evocative of wood knots or, in the bottom middle, what really looks (to me) to be the beady-eyed ghost of a tiny dog. Kennedy’s acronymized titling scheme is at once perplexing and inviting. Some are immediately phonetic, like the sine-waved showstopper K.S.N.G.P.N.T.G., or the shooting stars of N.W.S.N.G., while others, such as the looping S.M.O.T.G.O.V., or back-office work W.N.D.T.B.O.V.G.R.S., are complex and near inscrutable. While the gallery keeps a secret title codex for collectors, I think there’s an immense amount of fun to be had in coming up with one’s own, or better yet, letting their mysteries be.

Soundtracking and grounding the exhibition is Kennedy’s longtime friend, first time collaborator, and 12k Records artist, Marcus Fischer. His Memory Gates (2026) is a recursive ceiling-suspended tape loop comprised of two linked reel-to-reel machines with faint-blue and transparent-yellow acrylic discs. They orbit each other like celestial bodies and sway as the nearby gallery door opens. The sound, four channels spread via Fischer’s tour-worn speaker drivers mounted at various points between Kennedy’s paintings (a sort of punctuation that dispels any starchy white-wall pretexts) is somewhere between euphoric sound-bath and natural field recordings, a contrast to Fischer’s wall-of-sound approach to improvisational live performance. At any point moving back and forth, you might catch a bird song or a new overtone in one ear, then the other, to quadraphonic effect. When looking at Memory Gates, you’re also looking through the window it faces, the long strands of tape heart-framing those sitting on the bench immediately outside or catalyzing any number of eye-contact moments with passersby; where this kind of music is often enjoyed in spite of other people, here there’s an immense satisfaction as they appear. Tiny flakes of iron oxide—rust, a key component in magnetic tape—gently fall off the loop to the top of the recorder as it continuously spins throughout the show’s run, physically evoking William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops but affecting the sound in far subtler ways thanks to Fischer’s emphasis on evolution over decay. In two framed works, This is the Sound of Where the River Meets the Sea (2026) and This is the Sound of Night in the Foothills (2026), Fischer makes sound secondary to the tape loop itself—free to satisfyingly flop about as the frame is hung from several orientations—granting a physical body to his questions of tape as instrument, artistic material, and means of data storage. A video work on the far back wall, On Belonging (2025–26) removes tape from the equation and hits us with pure data, blending Fischer’s field recordings and real-world trail cam footage into bright washes of night-vision blue on the skies of Oregon.

In alternating Kennedy’s warm abstraction with Fischer’s material investigations, a true duet, In Sun gets at deeper questions about the nature of memory recall. Whether back at the caves in Altamira or in today’s AI-induced memory shortages, art and history have been inexorably tied to fragile, malleable, and volatile forms that cannot escape the forces of entropy, no matter how advanced they are (let it be remembered that the psycho teens of DOGE couldn’t crack a better solution for our Social Security records than the reams of data tape stored underground by the United States government). This work won’t exist the same way forever: at some point, Fischer’s loop must be shut off or it will shed enough material to be unrecognizable, and Kennedy’s pigment dyes will fade with exposure to light and oxygen. In an era obsessed with preservation, reference, and nostalgia, there’s a liberation in leaving these works’ legacies, and thereby the artists’, open to the realities of time. Through accepting this entropy—defying any number of forces calling for various returns to imagined “old ways”—and emphasizing materials that will inevitably fray and warp over the duration of their lifespans, Kennedy and Fischer have created a body of ultimately connected works that, while emerging from the realms of process and memory, are just like us: soaking in the light cycles, free to become ever-so-slightly anew.