TUSSLE /// Funny Weather: June 2026

by TUSSLE, June 7, 2026 read article

Especially in a place like New York, unexpected weather can send the whole city into a crisis. Our reactions to the unexpected can, in turn, be equally unusual: have you ever taken a $20 uber for five blocks during a torrential downpour, or followed Marilyn Monroe’s example from The Seven Year Itch and tried putting your underwear in the icebox during a heat wave? When things are out of balance, we can try to restore the equilibrium in our own weird ways.   ​  

Funny Weather, which opened at KUNSTRAUM in the Brooklyn Navy Yard this week, is a presentation of artists doing exactly that: reacting to extraordinary conditions and sharing their results with us. So named for critic Olivia Laing’s collection of essays Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, the exhibition features four artists: Mimi O’Chun, Kara Beth Rasure, Jo Cosme, and Yixuan Wu.

Funny Weather combines sculpture and photography works that are quite literally impossible to look at from just one angle. Interactive photographs and intricate sculptures all grasp at time: shifting portraits of similarly changing landscapes in Puerto Rico/Borikén, or an object oozing in permanent suspension from a chair. Each artist engages with precarity in different ways, while reinterpreting and realigning reality through their work. Either by highlighting the absurd or aiming to rehabilitate it, these four artists turn moments of unrest and uncertainty into opportunities for analysis, comfort, and invention.

Hung to the right of the doorway, Mimi O’Chun’s soft sculpture Gather Round the Campfire is the first artwork to greet visitors. A cloth axe is hung where one might typically find a fire hydrant or other such emergency tool, offering to arm visitors immediately upon entry. O’Chun’s eye for detail and meticulous crafting make it clear that this is not a generic representation of an axe but a specific facsimile, particularly through inclusions like the company branding on the handle.

In a moment where the superfluous is branded as necessary and the useful is branded as fashionable, O’Chun’s sculptures assert their wit, value, and aesthetic quality through her controlled and highly skillful storytelling. Gather Round the Campfire cuts straight into a social critique of the aestheticization of identity and its subsequent reduction to consumptive habits. The axe is part of a larger series of work featured in the show, which includes a recreation of a wooden slingshot and Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience (pieces titled Nostalgia for a Youth We've Never Known and Escapist Reading, respectively). This series references aesthetic components of the “hipster” subculture, approximately associated with the early 2000s, which synthesized a nostalgia for the past with modern consumerism.     

In its analysis of the cultural shifts underlying this proliferation of third wave coffee shops, performative reading, and hiking boots that would never see a trail, O’Chun’s axe takes the phenomenon of accessorizing with the utilitarian to a point of literal transformation. An obsession with quality craftsmanship and the artisanal speaks to a desire to distinguish oneself, and thus ground one’s identity, through the objects one owns.      

Even now, a wave of nostalgia for the simplicity and reliability associated with the traditional is part of a greater social rebound to conservative values. The conflation of our aesthetic lives with our political lives is just as prevalent, however, in the push for hyper-modern, hi-tech solutions to problems which may or may not exist. O’Chun’s Uberlift XS features a drone hanging from the ceiling, transporting two pigeons bound up in little BDSM-esque harnesses. This sculpture is not a recreation but a joke, and the punchline is our ability to mislead ourselves.

If not to mislead ourselves in the name of progress, why else would we insist on giving machines faces, names, and pronouns? I recently heard a former law professor summarize, in my opinion, a consequence of this deception. In short, he observed that as we aim to protect the machine from objectification, we direct our proclivity to “dehumanize, denigrate, and depersonalize” at one another. Why reserve all our love for the mechanical, in the name of human progress?  ​  

I see Kara Beth Rasure’s Algopress sculptural series as giving shape to this relationship. If the algorithm (so referenced by the title Algopress) shapes how we communicate and what conversations we participate in, it follows that our digital consumption habits shape and reflect our own identity. Rasure seems to join O’Chun in suggesting that our identities are formed and reformed through what we choose to chew up and spit back out. In this case, pulped Amazon boxes form miniature portraits of friends and family, molded in a 3-D printed and roughly iPhone-sized brick.  

Hung at approximately eye level, a mechanical arm extends from the press towards the viewer and greets you with a face of its own, borrowed though it may be. It references classical portraiture - a means of preserving and representing identity for posterity. Only now, Rasure has stripped away the body to “optimize” the portrait. The face, perhaps the most accessible encapsulation of human pathos, gives easy and immediate identity to an assembly of plastic and metal with no discernable function aside from producing and maintaining itself.

As an animation lover, Algopress immediately made me think of the character Koh the Face Stealer from popular cartoon Avatar the Last Airbender. A centipede-like spirit who can steal human faces and wear them as his own, Koh could trap his victims forever. Especially in the context of deepfakes and AI advertisements, it seems more plausible than ever that our likeness is our identity is our agency.

I don’t know if Koh’s face-stealing was necessary for his own freedom, or if it was just cruel sport, but it undoubtedly became a source of power and domination over others. Though it also plays with the idea of borrowing and reconstructing identity, Algopress doesn’t quite scare me. In part due to its structural minimalism and delicate size, Algopress seems to only gently poke fun at what LLM models like Claude and ChatGPT are proudly asserting: Anything you (human) can do, I can do better.

Opposite from and sandwiched between Rasure’s sculptures are the works of Jo Cosme, whose photographs juxtapose oppositional presentations of her home. Often known in the United States by its Spanish name Puerto Rico (meaning rich port), Borikén is the name used by the indigenous Taíno people of the island, and translates loosely to Land of the Valiant and Noble Lord. The common erasure of Borikén history and the displacement of its native people is one focus of Cosme’s practice, who herself was displaced from the island to Seattle after Hurricane Maria.

If we can accept self-expression as a way of claiming freedom and agency, there is a strong conceptual link between Cosme’s investment in the portrayal and understanding of Borikén and the work of O’Chun and Rasure. Cosme’s work raises a multitude of questions about consumption, identity, and memory. If O’Chun and Rasure ask how our consumption changes us, Cosme asks us to reevaluate the consequences of consumption outside of ourselves. If we can alter ourselves through consumption, then surely being consumed is also an altering experience. In separating a place from its people, we transform it for consumption; in separating a place from its history, we transform it for consumption. Is it not another act of denigration and depersonalization to subsume the unique identity of another in our eagerness to augment ourselves and our experience?

Cosme’s portraits of Borikén subvert its image as an aesthetic object of consumption by showing us a place that is vocal, responsive, and volatile. In a previous interview with Artist Trust, Cosme has spoken about how she hopes her audience will become more aware of the “power dynamics perpetuated when you travel as a continental US-born National to places such as the Caribbean”.

Cosme’s unique usage of lenticular printing allows viewers to see two images collapse into each other in one piece. Island scenery in attractive color palettes contrasts with scenes of dilapidation and development, as well as hand written messages on signs and mailboxes; walking around Maunabo y Calle Loiza transforms a distant view of the ocean, slowly revealing a signpost reading Aquí Vive Gente: “People live here”. In another piece, palm trees on a trash-strewn beach frame a distant American flag - a visual representation of the tension between the United States’ territorial claim to Borikén and its notorious neglect of the island, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Shifting one’s perspective of the same piece reveals an expensive looking condo and a red mailbox sporting the titular graffiti of the work, Gringo Go Home.

Nearby, Yixuan Wu’s sculptures tuck themselves into corners in a slight tonal shift from the other works. Materially and aesthetically, the everyday materials of Wu’s works mesh well with Rasure’s sculptures, which curator Imogen Aukland has planted them under. They are more quiet and interior, both in terms of their references to domestic space and the protective posture each piece holds: in one corner, isle iii hunches its shoulders and cradles an egg-like blown glass object with a body of sponges. Across from it, the entwined forms a protective shell of stools, both holding in and perhaps squeezing out the soft, melting body of another blown glass object. The smooth, pink, translucent glass and its textured, off-white shell reminded me of some kind of mollusk, or a sea animal living within a coral reef.

Yixuan Wu’s sculptures share Cosme’s straightforward portrayal of fragility and (im)balance, while working primarily with the aesthetic language of the interior space. Her sculpture the entwined looks like it could be in a stage of decay at first glance, but upon closer inspection the stack of chairs gets its unique texture from tightly packed rice and millet grains: abundance rather than rot. Both are common ingredients in porridge, a balm for the sick, sad, or otherwise digestively challenged. Comfort is a main theme of Wu’s works, and her use of form balances restriction and support in the same way that her use of material balances domesticity with unfamiliarity.

Both the entwined and isle iii came out of a prolonged period where Wu was the caretaker of her grandmother. Her grandmother’s condition and the reversal of their roles similarly transformed the landscape of the home, and Wu transposed this relationship onto her appropriation of household materials like sponges, chairs, and cereal grains. The glass objects within, which feel organic if not bodily at face value, are never fully contained or subsumed by their protective structures: half in, half out - dangling off the precipice but held all the same. Just as these familiar objects recontextualize their identities: ingredients becoming armor, sponges becoming a nest, so too does the soft body continue to mull over its place within the container.

As curator Imogen Aukland describes it, Funny Weather provides a context for artists to respond to political and personal instabilities with reflection and documentation rather than resolution.

Though artwork may be limited in the way it can respond materially to disaster, artmaking lends itself naturally to cultural observation and generative discussion. If artists are to succeed at the role of society’s mirror that James Baldwin prescribed for us in his essay The Creative Process, then we should not shy away from making work in times of crisis. What I like about Funny Weather is that Cosme, O’Chun, Rasure, and Wu are not trying to sell us a portrait of their own intellectual finesse - they are simply showing us things that are true from their own lives. Especially in a time like this, where some of the most important truths are obfuscated and systematically penalized, offering a candid reflection can be a radical thing. The dark humor and playfulness present in the work of Funny Weather do not distract from the genuine conversation they engage us in, but ground it in a lack of pretension and a clear personal investment in its stakes.

“Funny Weather” KUNSTRAUM LLC, 20 Grand Ave, #509, Brooklyn, NY. Through June 21, 2026. Note: There will be a Curator’s Tour led by curator Imogen Aukland on Sunday, June 7th at 3:00PM, and an Artist Panel Discussion with Mimi O Chun, Kara Beth Rasure, Yixuan Wu, moderated by Imogen Aukland on Sunday, June 21st at 5:00PM.     

About the author: Aliza Katzman is a painter and writer based in Brooklyn.