“Punchline” at Jane Lombard Gallery

As a university student of celebrated French clown Philippe Gaulier mentioned, “Once you can deal with the insults, a little something within you cracks and you can start off.” If the most effective form of humor is crafted from inward rage, “Punchline” provides. The group exhibition of eleven artists characteristics is effective including Divya Gadangi’s Remember to Keep Your Unique Indian Magnificence, 2014—a movie match dependent on a disagreement Gadangi experienced with her mom over the artist’s switching hair color—and a online video of a effectiveness by Kalup Linzy that yearns for a freer future, even freedom from cringe.

The fantasy that ridiculing our enemies can deliver them down can be subsistence for surviving dark situations. A choice of posters by the Guerrilla Women begs the query: Does public humiliation perform at a rapid ample speed? Their incisive criticisms from many years back keep on being just as unresolved as much more current layouts. Acquire 3 Methods to Create a Museum Wall Label when the Artist Is a Sexual Predator, 2018, an indictment of painter Chuck Shut that finds launch by way of insulting institutions and curators who, gagged by wealthy collectors, are still far too cowardly to be outspoken.

Ben Sloat’s miniatures from the 2008–22 series “I’m Not Like Other Guys”—mockeries of Jeff Koons’s porcelain sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988—also stick it to the man. Some of these operates, which render the King of Pop as 1980s cartoon people these types of as Skeletor or Lion-O, remark upon the regrettable fungibility of Jackson’s impression but also restore a semblance of dignity to the icon by portraying him at the peak of his success—and not as kitschy deracinated loon, à la Koons—following the launch of his 1982 Thriller album.

Reniel Del Rosario’s set up Exist Through the Gift Shop (Jane Lombard Gallery Present Shop), 2022, made primarily for the exhibition (and whose title parodies the 2010 documentary on graffiti artist Banksy) presents laughs on the low-priced, advertising individually packaged ceramic cigarettes labeled “Artist’s Strain Relief” and sugar cubes constituting a Do-it-yourself kit for Kara Walker’s large sugar sculpture A Subtlety, 2014. Close by, ceramics and drawings by Madeline Donahue confront the maternal physique as one particular that is quickly stretched—or even hijacked—by new little ones and a mother’s like for them.

In its best times, “Punchline”—curated by Yng-Ru Chen, founder of the Brookline, Massachusetts­­–based gallery Praise Shadows—shows how absurdity can come to be an motor and strain position for feminist, antiracist, and queer battle. Potentially, as the work here seems to suggest, as we trudge via end situations, nothing at all can be way too punishing if it is embraced as a joke.

— Danielle Wu