(The Show About) The Show About the Show
Sunday, August 23 , 2026Nature of Things at Spacy DTX
Exhibition Text
In The Show About the Show, Caveh Zahedi takes us on a meta rollercoaster, as every episode is about the making of the previous episode, and anyone who quits the show gets replaced by an actor to “accurately” portray what happened in the making of the previous episode. In response to Caveh Zahedi’s brilliant and self-eviscerating experimental project of radical honesty, The Show About the Show, Nature of Things has curated an exhibition within Spacy in which every work of art is a layered reference of a reference, but also contains works that question authenticity, authorship, and identity. Every artwork in the show is somehow about another artwork or are stand-ins / imitators of other artworks.
The “Andy Warhol” Polaroids from the set of Basquiat (1996, dir. Julian Schnabel) feature David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Benicio Del Toro as Benny Dalmau (Basquiat’s friend), Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Gary Oldman as Albert Milo (really just a thinly veiled Julian Schnabel). Warhol used the Polaroid camera in his studio or out in social situations for over 25 years, almost as a visual diary. Many real Warhol Polaroids exist of himself, Basquiat, and even Julian Schnabel. In fact, there may have been as many as 40,000 Andy Warhol Polaroids at the time of his death.
Cody Ledvina has a favorite painting by Jan van Huysum at the Wallace Collection in London, where he lived for a brief time before returning to his hometown of Houston. He thinks the overall painting is pretty boring, but the real matter at hand is some of the reflections in the grapes. Ledvina decided to reflect an entire impeachment trial of Ken Paxton in each of the grapes based on the van Huysum painting.
Peter Doig, when he moved to the Port of Spain in Trinidad, started a StudioFilmClub, and would paint posters for each of the films. They are not tidy replicas by any means, but rather capture a loose, quick and decisive essence of the film itself. I (Tessa Granowski) learned of these posters from the friend that lent me the Basquiat polaroids and decided to try my hand at imitating Doig’s poster.
Mia Ardito has been working for over the last five years on a “reality” TV show, called “Peninsula Island Presents House of Love” - and this silkscreen print is a composite image that Ardito made of one of her sculptures (which act as a “backdrop” to the filming) and one of her Barbie-doll characters of the show, with a facemask. The title comes from a video that she made called “Sensitive Skin”, which is a play on Jewel’s 1995 song “I’m Sensitive”.
The work in this exhibition by Lane Hagood comes from a series of animal print paintings. The paintings are playfully a challenge to abstraction - they feel and look abstract, but in reality, they are a recreation of the human interpretation of a big cat’s skin. By zooming in on this irregular patterning, the spots almost become faceless heads of hair.
The Lawrence Weiner poster in this show came from a bus stop outside of an E-Flux bar in Brooklyn. The means of acquisition are… unknown. E-Flux installed the Lawrence Weiner posters shortly after the artist’s passing in December 2021. After the poster was “acquired” by myself and an acquaintance, the acquaintance made a copy of the poster for my birthday, and it has hung in my living spaces ever since. Lawrence Weiner’s practice is probably conceptually aligned with this copy process, considering Weiner was a leading figure of the ‘Conceptual Art’ movement, and many of his artworks were simply detailed instructions for others to create.
- Tessa Granowski
*This was written in haste, but with enlightened intellectual professionalism in mind