Marc Kokopeli
Reena Spaulings Fine Art | 165 East Broadway
On view through March 8, 2025
A pale pink ring with a minuscule screen playing the entire first season of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life; a plastic, double-doored, glistening green apple with another screen inside; two egg-shaped, cherry-red Memorex MSP-TV1300s with gleaming visors reminiscent of astronauts’ helmets; a tiny television embedded inside a row of red lockers embossed with golden letters reading “High School Musical”—this is an incomplete list of the hardware featured in Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition “MY TV SHOW I ❤️ TV,” currently on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art.
Stories of negligent fathers, lunchtime brawls, hesitant Little Leaguers, and molested children play out on the New York-based artist’s armada of screens. While most of this material was produced in the ’90s by an entity called the Committee for Children, the televisions themselves present a temporal disjunction: the Memorex sets were manufactured in 2002, and several others—which look like cavernous microwaves—were sourced more recently from Alibaba.
