Pippa Garner, “Misc. Pippa”
Matthew Brown Gallery | 390 Broadway
Through January 25, 2025
Pippa Garner's work was deservedly featured in this year's Whitney Biennial, but I was disappointed by how the artist's work was awkwardly isolated in the museum’s third-floor gallery, which always feels like an office-building hallway leading to the bathrooms. Walking into Matthew Brown Gallery in Tribeca was a relief; “Misc. Pippa” shows us what could have been at the Whitney. The California-based artist, who began by modifying appliances and cars, before turning to surgery and hormones to transform her body, is equal parts comedian and inventor. In 1982, she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (she was then presenting as a man), wearing a midriff-baring “Half-Suit” and later showing off her prototype of a high-heeled roller skate.
It's this character from decades ago who we see in Un(tit)led (Your Waiter Pippa), n.d./2024, a large-scale, color photograph of the artist as a bow-tie-wearing server in a mustard jacket, holding a pink ceramic tea service with two hands, while a third arm—a prosthetic—lifts a tray of cocktails up high. The various sculptural objects gathered here create their own sensory landscapes, such as a chair covered in toilet plunger suction cups (Suctionaire Chair, 1989/2024) and a square block of hair (Pubic’s Cube, 1982-83/2024) that sits on a plinth like a mad mashup of Méret Oppenheim and Donald Judd. (The object description confesses that the hair is fake). Gender play, altered anatomy, and gadgetry are through lines in Garner’s slapstick, visionary work.
