This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers Pat Oleszko’s burlesque street theater, Paul Chan’s inflatables, David Armstrong’s calm curiosity and Torbjorn Rodland’s subtle awkwardness.
Queens
Pat Oleszko
Through April 27. SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens; 718-361-1750, sculpture-center.org.
The veteran New York performance artist Pat Oleszko fills space with aplomb. You can’t miss her giant inflatable horn-blower sculpture in the 2026 Whitney Biennial.
A concurrent career survey at SculptureCenter in Queens features her deep pantheon of bombastic characters, crafted from ripstop nylon over the past four decades. Puffed-up witches, popes, generals and businessmen flub around the main hall, while a bushel of inflatable missiles from 2007, embroidered with puns like “Miss Fit” and “Miss Take,” occupies the center.
Oleszko’s creations hold a room, but these aren’t just sculptures: They’re the props and costumes for her enlightened take on burlesque street theater. Downstairs, past stuffed fabric outfits for a bodybuilder and a stripper-in-a-cake, the nooks and vaults in the building’s industrial basement display zany costumes, memorabilia and films documenting the artist’s appearances onstage and on the sidewalk.
One choice example, from a projected selection of Oleszko’s films and videos, has the artist in a padded red clown outfit trying to quench the puffy orange flames of an inflatable Bronx apartment building, waggling in a rubble-filled lot. She’s sounding the alarm for whoever’s listening.
Chelsea
Paul Chan
Through April 25. Greene Naftali, 508 West 28th Street; 212-463-7770, greenenaftaligallery.com.
Jabbering, flapping creatures beckoning from car dealerships or guarding the entrances of Nuts Factory stores — the multimedia artist Paul Chan has made a long study of these novelties, and the result is a surprisingly nuanced series of fan-powered inflatable sculptures.
They’re called “Breathers,” a name that imbues glorified windsocks with animistic life and intention. Viewing eight of them together allows you to appreciate the ways Chan guides their movements by varying the size and position of slits and holes. In “Hex 1 (Hadejwich),” 2024, three arms coming off a main trunk flick in rotation; the grouping “Tokener Choros 2,” 2024, resembles a ring-around-the-rosie of nodding, hooded druids.
The most intriguing pieces seem broken. At first I thought “Tokener Stasis,” 2025, a pair of black Breathers linking droopy arms, was out of commission, but on closer inspection their plugs connect to each other, not an outlet — they are limp and lifeless by design. Chan can pack a lot of pathos into a plastic bag.
Tribeca
David Armstrong
Through May 23. Artists Space, 11 Cortland Alley; 212-226-3970, artistsspace.org.
The first survey in the United States of the photographer David Armstrong (1954-2014) conveys calm curiosity. Not detached, but balanced, the way four blurry images of statuary, a chair, boxwood and bougainvillea, predominantly blue, green, yellow and pink, suggest the harmonized pigments of photographic prints.
Armstrong’s way of snapping the shutter with the subject out of focus poses a basic question: What is he looking at? He’s looking at looking itself; these photographs capture the act of sight, as the artist dips into the palette of what his eyes provide.
The show is called “Portraits,” and many of the pictures depict young people, mostly men, spread on cloudlike comforters in what feels like morning light, wrapped in a melancholic sense of potential, or showing their backs to the viewer. The exhibition is tautly hung; framed photos on the wall flank long vitrines displaying prints and albums of prints of fresh-faced subjects but also furniture and plants, each treated with the same delicacy. The camera is often an alienating tool, but Armstrong’s lens seems to bring him closer to his subjects.
Chelsea
Torbjorn Rodland
Through April 25. David Kordansky, 520 West 20th Street; 212-390-0079, davidkordanskygallery.com.
Torbjorn Rodland has gone soft. The Los Angeles photographer is known for polished still lifes and portraits with itchy psychosexual overtones, including a stack of eggshells or a sneaker squishing a man’s head. His images can feel abusive, like acts that aren’t crimes yet.
But his demure current show in New York, “Bones in the Canal and Other Photographs,” goes back to basics, abandoning the control of the studio for the freedom of a hand-held 35 millimeter camera. Here, atmospheric settings like forests and parking lots swallow lone figures; several pictures are pure landscapes.
The kinetic awkwardness is still there, just subtler, like the figure in a baggy white corded sweater hanging from a tree branch in the gray-scale “Straight Bend,” 2024, or an antique-looking delivery truck crisply positioned below a row of crumbling brick buildings in “Forgetting Victoria,” 2025. Other, bluntly offbeat pictures, such as “Reflections Above Revelations Below,” 2025 — a baby in a clown suit lying on a hardwood floor while sunlight hits the wall — are less interesting.
Rodland’s titles do a lot of work here. The show’s titular image, “Bones in the Canal,” 2024-26, is a wispy vertical black-and-white shot of a paved tributary, cluttered with brush, but no obvious bones — ominous, right? “Tavener’s The Lamb,” 2024-26, has a woman playing violin beside a bog. For those in the know (or access to Google), that tune brings modern dissonance to the tension and release of liturgical music, which is a fair description of Rodland’s latest work. The traditional format of the photos, slightly washed-out and uniformly cropped, anchors their contemporary disease.
The back portion of the show, though, is dedicated to a handful of larger color photos from Rodland’s kinky comfort zone. “Awkward Seat,” 2023-26, shows a naked butt, its sparse hairs backlit and glowing, hovering just above the outstretched hands of what looks like a Nativity statuette; “Apple Pie No. 2,” 2016-26, features an impressive dildo. More titillation here, but less mystery. Why are these people in these situations? Because the artist put them there.
The bigger works’ sense of sleazy sacrilege feels forced Compare these to “Church Rope,” 2024-26, a 35-millimeter portrait of a suited man leaning hard on a rope bracketed to a sanctuary wall, like he’s trying to bring it all down. I’ll take the new works’ modest but lingering profanity.
See the March gallery shows here.
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