“Punchline” at Jane Lombard Gallery

As a pupil of celebrated French clown Philippe Gaulier stated, “Once you can cope with the insults, something inside you cracks and you can get started.” If the finest type of humor is crafted from inward rage, “Punchline” provides. The group exhibition of eleven artists characteristics works which includes Divya Gadangi’s You should Sustain Your First Indian Splendor, 2014—a movie game dependent on a disagreement Gadangi had with her mom more than the artist’s shifting hair color—and a online video of a overall performance by Kalup Linzy that yearns for a freer upcoming, even independence from cringe.

The fantasy that ridiculing our enemies can deliver them down can be subsistence for surviving dim periods. A range of posters by the Guerrilla Girls begs the query: Does general public humiliation do the job at a quickly plenty of tempo? Their incisive criticisms from many years back continue being just as unresolved as much more recent models. Acquire 3 Means to Produce a Museum Wall Label when the Artist Is a Sexual Predator, 2018, an indictment of painter Chuck Close that finds release by way of insulting establishments and curators who, gagged by rich collectors, are however way too cowardly to be outspoken.

Ben Sloat’s miniatures from the 2008–22 series “I’m Not Like Other Guys”—mockeries of Jeff Koons’s porcelain sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988—also stick it to the gentleman. Some of these functions, which render the King of Pop as 1980s cartoon people this kind of as Skeletor or Lion-O, remark upon the regrettable fungibility of Jackson’s graphic but also restore a semblance of dignity to the icon by portraying him at the peak of his success—and not as kitschy deracinated loon, à la Koons—following the launch of his 1982 Thriller album.

Reniel Del Rosario’s installation Exist Through the Gift Store (Jane Lombard Gallery Present Shop), 2022, made specially for the exhibition (and whose title parodies the 2010 documentary on graffiti artist Banksy) offers laughs on the low-cost, advertising separately packaged ceramic cigarettes labeled “Artist’s Strain Relief” and sugar cubes constituting a Do it yourself package for Kara Walker’s giant sugar sculpture A Subtlety, 2014. Close by, ceramics and drawings by Madeline Donahue confront the maternal human body as a single that is easily stretched—or even hijacked—by new little ones and a mother’s appreciate for them.

In its highest times, “Punchline”—curated by Yng-Ru Chen, founder of the Brookline, Massachusetts­­–based gallery Praise Shadows—shows how absurdity can come to be an motor and tension place for feminist, antiracist, and queer wrestle. Most likely, as the get the job done here appears to be to advise, as we trudge by way of stop periods, very little can be much too punishing if it is embraced as a joke.

— Danielle Wu