The Small Brooklyn Project Space Challenging the Traditional Gallery System

I, like so many others of that generation lost to the internet, have been thinking about friction lately. How technology’s promise of seamless interconnection across people, geographies, and time has ultimately made each of us more alone. About the price we pay, if we’re willing, for community.

I thought about friction as I walked back and forth across Franklin Street in Greenpoint alongside a guy with a bike, looking for the project space Subtitled NYC; we finally found it behind one of multiple doors labeled with the same number. I thought about friction as I ducked under an intricate (and maybe not fire code-approved) armature of painted and taped-over wooden beams housing a television screen that had been etched into; a pair of papier-mache-framed bags of braided, acid-green hair; snippets of pixellated poetry heralding the end times, hand-drawn on cardboard; and much, much more. I thought about it as I stepped over the metallic tape on the floor of what looked like a paranoiac’s bedroom: countless coils of wires snaking over bags of flour and sparkling water; metal tubes connected to globes; a network of tree branches dangling above, housing a speaker trapped in a pyramidal cage.

“On Other Terms,” Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré’s current exhibition at Subtitled NYC, creates a kind of multisensorial overwhelm that mimics life, particularly urban life. (Did I mention it’s loud? There’s a fan that kicks on every now and again, as well as an ambient drone emanating from the speakers.) It reminds you that you have a body, that it exists in space, and that it can crouch, listen, investigate, feel, and do a million other miraculous things.

Both artists make work related to technology, in particular legibility and surveillance. But rather than expressing a simplistic message of refusal — “technology is bad and we ought to reject it” — they take the more complicated, treacherous, and ultimately interesting route. “Illegibility offers no simple refuge,” as curator Ho Won Kim writes in his smart press release. “To be unreadable is to risk erasure, a withdrawal from visibility that can amount to social death.”

So what is the path forward if neither submission nor rejection? Fall seems to propose a recoding of shared referents as one route, particularly in his use of chroma key green — the color of greenscreens, that shade specifically engineered to be replaced in post-production. To see it applied in such a jarringly analog environment, where every minor detail, down to a strand of hair caught in neon orange tape, screams “a human made me,” feels like the point. It’s a way of short-circuiting or reversing the usual narrative of technology encroaching upon or devouring real life.

Meanwhile, Jeré’s installations engage a found-object assemblage technique that I’ve begun to think of as an immigrant aesthetics — one of reuse, repurposing, reappropriating. Both artists’ strategies point to the precarious and tentative ways that we make do in everyday life, especially as technological, governmental, and economic systems police, surveil, and otherwise menace us. But, crucially, beauty also feels foundational to their practices. Despite their dense maximalism, these are formally gorgeous works, installations that you want to spend time with. In that way, they’re hopeful, suggesting that building livable pockets within inhospitable systems can yield not only survival but pleasure.

A similar ethos illuminates Subtitled NYC writ large. As its name indicates, it’s the kind of space that does the work of reframing the familiar rather than just grabs your attention. Founded by artist and gallerist Jaejoon Jang in May of 2022, its exhibitions are typically site-specific, and foreground process, experimentation, and close dialogue between artists. See, for instance, one by Armando Guadalupe Cortés that transformed the space into a tilting platform visitors could walk on, and another in which nearly every object in the space was doubled — or Seung-Jun Lee’s room-sized drawing, every inch covered in lashing marks that evoke both windstorms and nests. But Subtitled NYC also hosts more than formal interventions. Despite the economic precarity of operating an independent, non-commercial project space, it is one of few New York City institutions that has made its support for Palestinian liberation clear.

On the opening night of Fall and Jeré’s show, Jang — soft-spoken, with long, curly hair, chunky glasses, and a large neck tattoo — walked around chatting, smiling, looking proud and utterly at peace. “As an immigrant artist working in New York, sustaining this space has become closely intertwined with my own effort to remain here and continue contributing to the city’s artistic community,” he told me. “In that sense, Subtitled NYC is both a curatorial project and