Transmuting the World: On Harris Rosenblum’s Hybrid Moments
Harris Rosenblum • Nathaniel Sloan • Sara’s • Foreign & Domestic
Foreign & Domestic
24 Rutgers Street, New York, NY 10002
July 9 – August 9, 2025
In Harris Rosenblum’s new solo exhibition Hybrid Moments, programmed by Sara Blazej and New York’s Foreign & Domestic gallery (on view through August 9), the artist reckons with the artificiality of contemporary existence as mediated by networked computer systems, the co-presence of the ephemeral and eternal in petroleum-derived material manufacturing, as well as the potential for salvation by way of transmutation. In these pieces, as in prior work, Rosenblum portrays simultaneously the grotesque character of the present moment alongside the continued opportunity it offers to affirm life, beauty, hope, and love.
Unobtrusively tucked into a corner of the space sits Infinite Pain, a CPU running an accurate simulation of a nematode’s nervous system being subjected to continuous pain stimuli. In this work, Rosenblum fashions himself the “craftsman,” or demiurge, the clumsy if not malicious god of Gnostic Dualism who is responsible for the creation of our fallen world which retains only the barest trace of the ideal forms. The glass panel that forms one side of the chassis allows the viewer to look within the inner-workings of this miniature prison, which recalls by its intricate labyrinth of componentry the shadowy environs of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione. The disembodied consciousness—if one can call it that—of the nematode within cannot begin to fathom the logic of the world that has been invented to bind it in eternal suffering, a realm of sleek electronics and transparent surveillance. In just this way, in a contemporary context in which tech firms like Palantir further cement their position within the state administrative framework of panopticism by the day, we may be more like the nematode than we are not.
The walls of the gallery’s main space display four works from the Lovers series: a set of paintings, each approximately four feet wide by six feet tall, that are composed of forty polylactic acid plates, individually printed with a single layer of filament to compose images reproducing photographs that document pairs of unearthed skeletons locked in eternal embrace. The material characteristics of the filament together with the specialized printing process combine to achieve an anisotropic luster, causing the ghostly images to appear metallic, shimmering in the light of the fluorescent tubes above and shifting their contours as the viewer moves through the space. Presenting the skeletal figures at 1:1 scale, the series re-presents what was originally neutral documentation taken in an archeological context as reverent memorial; the broken pediment and other classicizing details of the ebonized wooden frames evoke Beaux-Arts funerary monuments in their ornate solemnity. Of the work included in this exhibition, it is this series that most clearly presents an alchemical transmutation: the prima materia or primal substance of our world—of contemporary manufacturing—is coagulated, refined, and transmuted into a salvific vision of love, that force which, in its capacity to affirm and reproduce life, may truly be considered the Philosopher’s Stone. A variety of plastic most commonly used in the kind of single-use food packaging that litters our environment is instead employed to memorialize humanity’s continued ability to find reassurance, strength, and asylum in the arms of another, even unto death. Plastic’s quality of permanence that in all other contexts holds severe negative consequences for the natural world nevertheless finds in these works an appropriate application. Yet the eternity invoked by the series does not overwhelm, moderated by the ephemeral quality of the light that dances across its surfaces. Thus love, that deathless driver of human endeavor, is as dynamic as it is immortal.
The exhibition centers on a sculptural tableau, Bacchus, composed of eleven goblin-like figures engaging in various activities and displaying likewise varied emotional states, presenting a spectrum of human experience from dejection to exultation, from envious solitude to ecstatic union. In this work, art historical precedent mixes with pop culture pastiche, as the names of Greco-Roman mythological figures are applied to the spindly forms arranged in poses drawn from the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Insofar as the title of the composition allows us to infer regarding the nature of the figures it subsumes, these may be understood as bacchants—worshippers of Bacchus/Dionysus who, enthused by means of any number of possible intoxicants, offer their devotion to his divine presence through orgiastic, and sometimes violent, celebration. In addition to classical reference, the quasi-monstrous quality of the figures marks the influence of Hieronymus Bosch, whose Garden of Earthly Delights (1510) also presents a surreal image of excess. And yet, unlike that famed triptych, Bacchus does not divide Paradise from Inferno quite so neatly. Instead, as throughout the exhibition, high must be admixed with low—hybridity being one of the defining characteristics of the age. The gray, lifeless skin of these creatures reflects their artificial, petroleum-derived origins; their malformed physiology, like ours, a product of cancerous modernity. Yet we see them unhindered by their deformations as participants in the great dance of life: the figures Eros and Psyche, frozen in tender embrace, are looked upon by a goblin, labelled The Lament, whose facial expression and body language betray the deep hurt of a love unrequited; the lithe bodies of The Dancers arranged in complementary poses present a picture of two beings in sync, in which each responds instantaneously to the subtle movements of the other; the intertwining limbs of The Wrestlers struggle for bodily domination of the other. In all these and other configurations, Bacchus shows us a vision of life to be lived to the fullest, even now, even under whatever horrid circumstances we may come to find ourselves within before we have eventually achieved the dialectical resolution of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production. We must, as do the goblins before us, live unbound by—and yet not ignorant of—the unique character of our present miseries.
Our lives and loves are today measured in hybrid moments, made no less beautiful and pure by the squalid nature of the materials that compose them. Our bodies, riddled with microplastics, exhibiting the long-term effects of ingestion of ultra-processed foods and nicotine vapes containing heavy metals like lead and arsenic—metals which, by coincidence, were also the bane of the medieval alchemists who frequently employed them in their experiments and were thereby subequently poisoned by them—are nevertheless the vehicles that allow us to experience the sublime joys which have since time immemorial given meaning to our ongoing struggle for liberation. While the pessimism of our intellect must pay careful attention to the contours of the prison in which the demiurge of techno-capital has locked us, the optimism of our will must continue to seek the boundless grace of the embodied other as solace, strength, and, perhaps, a route of escape.
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Loved this. Rosenblum does it again!