On the Swing of Norms

In a state of frigid ambivalence, a pensive sperm takes a drag from his cigarette. Drool slides down his cracked onyx skin and the ridge of his scarf, oozing onto the black metal perch beneath him. He stares into a room of aspirational structures, vernacular relics, glitter and shit-leaking window board-ups and thinks:


a) I simply want to present people with our ruins.
b) I laid down on the ground and listened to the world doings its turns in step with the putrefaction.
c) How does one live in this place, attune to it?

On the Swing of Norms, a two-person exhibition from Brandon Ndife and Louis Osmosis, offers a few options. In it Ndife and Osmosis search for salvation through commodity’s glut, rehearsing models for living that call upon potentials for transformation under conditions of brutal inequity and excess. They’re quick to admit the impotence of some attempts—boarded windows can be dolled-up in silver, cherry red, or baby blue but they’re still busted, and agit-prop constructions don’t exactly have the zing they did a century ago—but insist on trying still. In bombastic and tender proposals, Ndife and Osmosis look at everything to see what possibilities may still be held, how the stuff of this world might be rerouted, what more it could possibly yield.

Mascot for The Cold (2026) may be the room’s brooding anchor, but Osmosis’s Centrifugal Pickles #4 and #5 (2026) offer their own speculative proposals. Heroic calls for mobilization constructed from consumer leftovers and industrial detritus, the Pickles lean, sabotaging the classical stability of verticality to instead promise ascent upward and outward alike. Their states of continuous mobility, however, seem less indicative of permanent revolution than permanent suspension. Flavor Flav-scaled Rolexes proudly announce the Pickles as “superlative chronometers”—icons of accuracy, performance, and precision—which for about eight decades have been technologically outpaced by atomic and quartz clocks. The new vision of the lenticular prints tucked inside their rusted grids, an eBay-acquired “3D Lenticular Poster of an Asian Lady in provocative pose” for the colored Pickle and pandas for its black and white companion, is just a cheap trick. If their restless and dynamic forms call to mind Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20)—a maquette for a gravity-defying multimedia center that would be championed in Soviet parades and state fairs before, in a humiliating turn, being dismissed by Leon Trotsky as romantic and impractical—the Pickles seem ready to deflate themselves from the jump; Osmosis lets their limp promise of technological liberation hang in the room.

Amidst these stunted utopian trials, Ndife’s proposals seem closer to the real thing: communally adorned trees, domestic fragments, objects of everydayness staged here as models for living. They evoke a warm yet oddly porous recognition, as though the almost-real has penetrated the gallery; they are not scavenged or repurposed but rather built from scratch in Ndife’s studio, the artist insisting on this activity of making to construct specific yet unlocatable objects. In doing so Ndife circumvents the classist logics of the readymade as weakly authored and the embedded historicity of the found object, the result balancing somewhere in-between: tenderly fabricated sculptural props suggestive of and open to indeterminate encounters. Group Huddle (Satellite) and(for unknown) (2026), with their cardboard-and-foam cores and painted bark dupes, recast anonymous city trees as collective shrines, gathering sites, and charging stations. A three-way splitter nestled in a crevice of (Satellite)’s trunk draws undulating lines across the bark’s grooved skin, its frayed cords reaching for connectivity; a constellation of half-melted candles dot the trunk of (for unknown), offering their own potential energies. Nearby, a headboard and mantle begin to model an interior dwelling. Their generic familiarity is disconcerting, almost lonely; frames and a tinsel boa would indicate domesticity if not for the quasi-organic forms (plastic leaves and wiry clouds of sisal) that seem poised to reclaim the wooden cores. They appear plucked out of a dream, a dumpster, or someone’s house post-eviction, Ndife making evident the unpredictability of ornamentation and its ability to conjure new collectivities and strange melancholies alike.

On the Swing of Norms interrupts realities of constriction with brief, fantastical alternatives: giving plywood bars some dazzle, making public trees a sanctuary, envisioning a limitless future in the spin of a torqued scissor gate. These moves—seeking some kind of beauty left in the mundane—might not always work, but they’re the best ones we have left.

-–Quinn Schoen

Brandon Ndife (b. 1991, Hammond, Indiana) lives and works in New York. His sculptures fuse forms that resemble domestic objects with elements derived from the natural world. Through hand-building, painting, and casting in synthetic resin or polyurethane foam, Ndife creates meticulous replicas that keep the readymade tradition at a subtle remove. Expectant with ripening and rot, the works appear like relics unearthed from a distant past or envoys of a dystopian future. Ndife is drawn to domestic items, in part, for their capacity to index American life under capitalism—wrought with racial, class, and now ecological disparities in all that we touch. In his assemblages, wild growth seems poised to overtake the built environment, with all its structural exclusions. For him, the works "operate as portals that get us thinking about objects that are larger than our systems, larger than ourselves.”

Louis Osmosis (b. 1996, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2018. Working primarily in sculpture, installation, performance and text, Louis Osmosis takes a speculative approach to form to interrogate systems of representation, duration, and continuity that enact contemporary culture. His practice revolves heavily around modes of manufacture/craft and humor, incorporating fabrication and vernacular materials to muddy notions of genre and causality. Osmosis’s sculptural objects operate as proxies that toggle between various affects and constructed scenes so as to engender what he calls a “dramaturgy of discrepancies” and a poetics of discontinuity.