The Brooklyn Rail

Cottage Industry, A.D.’s first show since leaving Two Bridges for Ridgewood, showcases three artists whose work evokes the small, craft-based operations of the show’s namesake. Each artist fashions one-of-a-kind works in studios and backyards, and sources their materials from their immediate surroundings. Bright orange Home Depot buckets, raw slabs of wood, paper towels, old sweaters, and stuffed animals bring the unassuming white room to life.

Liz Magor’s sculpture Pembina (2017) at first appears cute and surreal, but upon inspection, the work becomes disturbing. A hollow, polymerized gypsum cast of a cardboard box retains the relief of tape marks, and the indentations left from the flaws in the box seem like scars. The stuffed animal is actually a seamlessly stitched Frankenstein’s monster, with a pig’s face replacing a monkey’s. The pig’s eyes, the color of eggplant, slant downward in a morose expression. It is a chimera, whose soft little feet are barely latched to the gypsum pedestal with hidden magnets. The creature carefully cradles an upside-down sweater from the waist. The garment hangs like a condemned criminal. A sheer single layer of tulle netting encases the sweater, though the tulle has been cut to foreground a “Pembina Pipe Liner” patch logo. Pembina, a natural-gas infrastructure company, which has been accused of greenwashing and encroaching on Indigenous lands, operates in Western Canada, near Vancouver, where Magor lives and works. The sweater is a Cowichan sweater, a name which honors one of the tribes that popularized the warm, nearly waterproof garment. Hand-knit from wool, these sweaters usually feature an impressive collar and are known for their patterns of Canadian flora and fauna. Indigenous peoples invented the style, which blends European and native garment-making techniques, during the forced Westernization campaigns by the Canadian government. The sweater is also colloquially referred to as a “Siwash sweater.” Siwash is likely a slang term for “savage.” The sweater would eventually become associated with Canadian identity more broadly, and be featured in Olympic celebrations. Like the homunculus pig-monkey, the combination of gypsum and cardboard, and the sweater with a sewn-on patch, two entities that were artificially smashed together must now co-exist as one whole.

Brooklyn-based painter Joseph Brock also blends surprising materials in his physically dense paintings. Kear and Noel (C.4) (2025–26) encases paper towels beneath layers of acrylic medium, a kind of paint without pigment. This makes the perfectly rectangular objects appear foregrounded, evoking the precision of buildings. Dotted patterns on the paper towel suggest constellations, a stitching pattern, a logo, or a child’s first attempt at tracing letters. The dotted shapes are in the process of becoming communicative but stop short. The dots do not even appear on the same layer of the canvas, suggesting an editing process, where additions to the communication have been made at distinct times. Viewers at the opening craned their necks to inspect the mysterious painting more closely. The points of interest in Brock’s other painting Kemble’s Eyelets (C.4) (2026) are the edges of the canvas. The two simple crayon lines draw the viewer’s eyes down to the bottom of the frame, where one can ruminate on the build-up of scrap cloth, acrylics, and gesso.

Emily Janowick’s Final Resting Place (2026) is the culmination of a larger project about the life and death of corn. Janowick previously installed live stalks of corn in tight rows in Kate Werble Gallery in SoHo. Janowick grew the crops during an artist residency and later in the artist’s backyard in Queens. Attendees of A.D. were instead met with the dead corn husks, now lined up horizontally on a brutal wooden slab, complete with nails sticking out, which may have been hammered in for viewer safety. The husks retain merely their roots and handfuls of dirt. Suspended on a plank of wood and balanced on their former Home Depot buckets, it is as if they are on a bridge to the afterlife. Now they lie silently rotting, with flies buzzing about and agitating the audience. The husks symbolize human corpses while being corpses themselves. At one time, the cornstalks stood tall and proud in Manhattan, accompanied by a helpful zine written by Janowick that gave context to the project. However, in this final interaction, nothing speaks for the dead corn except the bleak title.

Each artist in Cottage Industry energizes objects we would otherwise look past. A stuffed-animal holds a sweater containing memories of capitalist domination. The orange of the Home Depot bucket is suddenly bright, stark, and alive against the brown, decaying vegetable it suspends. Here, thoughtful viewers can marvel at half-sheets of paper towels for their austere perfection.