The centerpiece of Kay Kasparhauser’s exhibition “New Decay” was a traffic barrier adorned with graffiti tags, scuff marks, a cigarette butt, and other bits of pedestrian detritus. These signs of life from outside the gallery were paired with actual life-forms. Indentations on top of the barricade contained stagnant water and, very likely, loads of bacteria. A terrarium built into the structure’s center housed isopods, bark, moss, pothos, and springtails. The title of the work, made this year, could serve as a useful coda for Kasparhauser’s spring show at Entrance: Every time I think I’m absolutely going to die I love you so much I love you so much.
That raw, messy sentence should be whispered between lovers on either side of an elevator door as it closes. It evokes the abject shortcomings of language—medium and message failing in tandem. Like the show itself, the work’s title is charged with “anxiety of the inadequate container,” the artist’s shorthand for our innate sense that the boundaries separating the internal from the external, or us from the world, aren’t up to the task.
Kasparhauser was born with a rare genetic mutation that makes her regularly and acutely aware of how inadequate a container one’s body can be. While she shies away from identifying as “a chronically ill artist”—the description another inadequate container—she doesn’t shy away from the illness itself and the way it has formed her, both physically and creatively. If one browses her social media, one might find unabashed photos of the enormous surgical scar that runs down her abdomen. In 2023, she was resting at a hotel after a difficult hospital stay and made the experience her work’s subject: convalescence as performance, medical detritus as works of art, well-wishers as studio audience. A year before, she wrote an essay about her obsession with the MTV program Jackass (2000–2002), focusing on Johnny Knoxville and the gang’s unusual acceptance of pain, encapsulated in a comic catchphrase they’d deliver before embarking on a dangerous—and potentially lethal—stunt: “This is gonna suck.”
While most people would admit that suffering, death, and decay are built into the contract of life, there is, of course, a pervasive societal reflex to deny these inevitabilities and hide them away. Kasparhauser is interested in that more difficult, yet essential, aspect of any balanced ecosystem. The artist’s terrariums are self-sustaining—during the run of the show, her isopods thrived. Her drawings, however, might have been the show’s most overtly thanatological element: The artist presented six sketches made with pigment from the wings of lantern flies, an invasive species of insect New Yorkers were briefly encouraged to kill on sight as an act of eco-citizenry.
Not all the sculptures here operated within the realm of bioart. Pieces such as Mutants, 2025, and Untitled (Container), 2024, veer toward assemblage, mixing latex and steel with foam discarded by Canal Plastics, long a downtown staple for New York’s artists and fabricators. But even when Kasparhauser employs synthetic materials, she uses them to connote mess, entropy, imperfection—the je ne sais quoi of biological life.
“New Decay” was urgent but playful, rigorous but unpretentious, unabashedly sincere without lapsing into naïveté or cringe—a high-wire act Kasparhauser is uniquely suited for as an artist living without a net. Maybe these are the good symptoms of inadequate-container anxiety, useful regardless of one’s physical health as America slides into authoritarianism and ocean temperatures rise. The hard boundaries we assumed protected state, country, and planet are becoming more porous and ineffective. Kasparhauser’s show demonstrated a noble response: grace and survival via Knoxvillian surrender and Sisyphean tenacity—a politics of making as if the elevator door is about to slam shut.
