Funny Weather

Funny Weather

May 17 to June 21, 2026 Opening Reception: May 17, 6-8pm

Curated by Imogen Aukland, Curator & Community Affiliate

Artists: Mimi O Chun, Jo Cosme, Kara Beth Rasure, and Yixuan Wu 

Funny Weather brings together artists working within a cultural atmosphere marked by instability. Political tensions, ecological disruption, and the saturation of media have created a landscape in which familiar structures feel increasingly exposed. Titled after critic Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, this exhibition brings together works which emerge from conditions of flux, offering gestures of reflection, resistance, and transformation.

In this exhibition, objects and image become unsettled, and form is deconstructed and reshaped. Across Funny Weather, distortion and reconstruction become ways of tracing how mediums, symbols, and systems behave when they are pushed beyond equilibrium. Materials meet at points of tension, landscapes shift, function becomes uncertain, and structures disassemble. Together, the four artists consider ways of both traversing and molding cultural landscape around them during periods of upheaval.

Jo Cosme explores the stakes of representation as it relates to perception of place. In Maunabo y Calle Loíza and Gringo Go Home, Jo Cosme uses lenticular printing to expose contradictory depictions of a Puerto Rican landscape in flux. Moving around the photographs, images are alternately concealed and revealed, tracing how tourism, natural disaster, and local resistance unfold simultaneously within the same terrain. This instability mirrors the conditions she captures, where place is not fixed but continuously altered by external forces. 

In Mimi O Chun’s soft sculptures, symbols of resistance and collective cultural experience are reworked through subversion and material illusion. UberLift XS conflates biological life and surveillance technology. Working distinctly in a post-digital era, Chun draws parallels between historic and contemporary systems of communication and mobility. Her detailed sculptures pit reality against absurdity, reworking humor and violence into an uneasy coexistence. 

Kara Beth Rasure’s work considers overlaps of the human and the mechanical, creating speculative devices which blend anatomy with utility. In her Algopress series, traditional portraiture is reimagined through modes of mass production and digital selfhood. Incorporating reused Amazon boxes as a material basis for the molded faces alongside plant-derived bioplastic armature, Rasure references a contrast between capitalist systems and sustainable futures. Her sculptures both imply and upend interactive use, subverting emblems of commodity and identity. 

In Yixuan Wu’s work, form is placed under pressure. Familiar structures become unstable, with function dissolved and reconfigured. Blown glass orbs seem to swell and expand; suspended in flux and compressed precariously between surfaces. In the entwined, the act of cushioning becomes inseparable from the act of constraining. Within modes of instability, Wu offers gestures of support and protection. In her work, structure does not promise stability. 

What holds when a forecast is uncertain?  “What art does,” writes Olivia Laing, “is provide material which with to think: new registers, new spaces. After that...it’s up to you.”  

In the absence of resolution, the works in Funny Weather propose new modes of inhabiting the unsettled.

Public Programs: 

Curator's Tour

Walkthrough of Funny Weather led by curator Imogen Aukland

Sunday, June 7th, 1:00pm

Artist Panel

Discussion with Mimi O Chun, Kara Beth Rasure, Yixan Wu, moderated by Imogen Aukland

Sunday, June 21st, 5:00pm 

Address: KUNSTRAUM, 20 Grand Avenue, Loft 509, Brooklyn, NY 11205

Hours: Thursday - Saturday, 12–6pm, by appointment only. Please contact us first.  

Please email: Imogen Aukland at curator@kunstraumllc.com to schedule your visit. 

For press inquiries, images, or interview requests, please contact: Imogen Aukland, Curator & Community Affiliate – curator@kunstraumllc.com

Image: Mimi O Chun, Uberlift XS. Courtesy of the artist