New York, NY — My Pet Ram presents The Nazelgazer, the debut New York solo exhibition by LA-based artist, CARO. Please join us for the reception on Friday, May 8th from 6-9pm. This will also mark MPR’s final exhibition on Hester Street, as the gallery will be taking an indefinite break.

Everybody’s working for the weekend. Stacking gigs, hoping to accrue PTO, and taking on jobs for meager benefits, the consistent hustle inherent to our capitalist moment has become a universal truth for all but a few. In The Navelgazer, CARO approaches this theft of time, dreams, and the psyche through the aesthetic of a seemingly innocuous beachscape. Mundane items like the lounge chair and umbrella canopy become reified objects and signals of a specific type of bourgeois relaxation, one concerned with and reliant on perpetual viewing and the imposed scarcity of leisure for the proletariat. The work low entropy emerges from an abandoned and broken chair, repaired and reconfigured by the artist with a sling of organza, hand-embroidered with approximately twenty thousand glass beads. The chair is at once ubiquitous, nostalgic, and emblematic of postmodern pastiche; it combines the symbols of luxury with the craft tradition to create an object steeped in historicity that still remains inexplicably common.

If low entropy speaks to time and nostalgia, Estrangement, CARO’s largest work to date, is concerned with illusion and prescription. There is self-implication in the artist’s auto-exploitation, laboring daily for months to bring to life a codified image of dominance. Yet, the artist’s adulation of persistence is ever-present. A riotous five-foot embroidered canopy of vermicelle beads and crystals on tulle and organza, variegated and dappled, strewn with light and heavied by weight, Estrangement acts as the ontological focus of the exhibition. What is it to dream within capitalism? Can we retrieve ourselves from the simulacra, or are we sunk too deep in depressive hedonia and detached spectatorialism? 

A multidisciplinary artist, CARO’s practice draws from the history of craft to instill notions of time and labor in their work. In flagging, a nod to the queer community and an acknowledgment of craft and its intrinsic pace, eighteen frayed flags of feathers, beads, and handmade lace are strung together with pearls. On close observation, the piece speaks to the artist’s minute maneuvers and fastidious care in its construction, recalling David Hammons’ ornate basketball hoops and laboriously decorated posts. 

Suspended in the gallery, flagging evolves from mere bunting and becomes a precious, jeweled necklace. Within the structure of capitalism, the body is idealized insofar as it resembles the machine. Equating ourselves with an apparatus that performs physical labor (and often does it more efficiently) has resulted in a shift away from an idealization of the body in favor of the mind. However, with the advent of the internet, computer-based work, and increasingly more complex machines, the precarity of the human mind is thrown into ever-sharper contrast. Actions are replaced by AI prompts, and labor is derided so that the more work one does, the less it matters to the powers that be. No one is ever free from work, and time “off” becomes illusory. CARO’s reinvigoration of handwork, used to create luxurious versions of objects made specifically for leisure, creates a startling dichotomy between the act of relaxation and the sheer amount of labor it takes to get there.

The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM, and by appointment. For more information, please contact info@mypetram.com.

Press release by CARO and Graham W. Bell