Charles LeDray’s Peter Freeman, Inc. exhibition, Shiner, contains no literal or figurative black eyes, no depictions of bruises or marks of shame. It does contain a scaled-down sculpture of a wooden shoeshine kit, Shiner (2015–23), with the title word painted on its side in wobbly yellow letters.

Louis Bury is the author of Exercises in Criticism (Dalkey Archive) and Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. He writes regularly about visual art for Hyperallergic and BOMB, and his creative and critical work has been published in Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tripwire, Boston Review, and The Believer.

The sculptor Dorian Gaudin has been making a name for himself with kinetic installations that combine Alexander Calder’s economy of form and Jean Tinguely’s gearbox aesthetic, teasing viewers with the stirrings of what seem like autonomous machines.