Aparna Sarkar February 19. 2025

Pap Souleye Fall, Stellarhighway, Aparna Sarkar, Wells Chandler, The Electric Pencil — Installation view of *HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT* at Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, New York (courtesy of the artist and Stellarhighway)

Pap Souleye Fall’s show HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT at Stellarhighway is exhilarating, particularly for artists who want to believe again–in high craft and the stimulating absurdities of our digital–physical lives. Pragmatic in its bones-and-all approach, and dreamy, as in: there are portals in this sludge. The physical wins here; the internet needs matter to survive, after all. But Fall teases out a flirtatious relationship between these realms, choosing digestion over didactics.

The showstopper is the painterly textile installation KEYEDUPKEYEDOUT, spanning one wall and the main gallery door. So many kinds of green…Mario Kart, Reptaur, key lime…but the effect is of one–undulating, infinitely flat, and fluorescent. Green-screen green. A green that absorbs. Hoover, magnet, tornado. Among the detritus sucked and sewn in: flayed beanie baby, nylon tote bag, sequins, reptile kama sutra. Limbs emerge from within, belonging to someone certainly inside or across the barrier of time and space of this patchwork portal. We learn that the limbs belong to Dead Pixel, Fall’s performance character (alter ego?), that queer trickster spirit. DP was swallowed by the green screen, eaten by the set. Dust to dust. Look again and there is rigor mortis in these stuffed bits. KEYEDUPKEYEDOUT is also a kombucha mother; she has been fed material and separated out over different iterations in different spaces. The stitching builds like scar tissue in one spot, a taste of what her future may hold—a living record of the times she has been taken apart and put back together. The work is punctuated by tiny baubles, fake pearls and cowrie shells and the occasional tinfoil ball, studded into an even diamond net. Fall’s reverence via ornamentation recalls tufted velvet upholstery, or the starry sky in an Indian miniature painting. That decadent and loving impulse to adorn. Then, too, come to mind the corners of bounding boxes on Photoshop.

The green screen is a physical-digital in-between, a backdrop meant to be replaced. The color was originally chosen for its alien-ness, an opposite to human skin tones that made it easier to isolate in post. By using the prop as the aesthetic, Fall engages with camp as speculative fiction. We know about performing reality, the ways that people project a smoother, fantasy version of a life online. Making use of this fabulous, loud color calls attention to the fact of all this staging, which happens in real time and space. Then, there’s a suspension to the work, like the infinite possibilities of what can be projected onto the green screen are hovering in the air.

In GRIGRISGREENSCREEN, you find rectangular satchels that are both pixel and gris-gris: talismans to protect and charm in the tradition of Voodoo practice. You’ll also find Kirby’s eyes. Such associations–video games and spiritualism, West African historical/cultural motifs and saleable manga characters, ricochet throughout the show. Global media consumption and existential consumption via faith as paths into and through one another. It’s all culture as fodder. The spiral in the center of this shield suggests this kind of time-and-space connectivity as much as it recalls the belly of the Pokémon, Poliwag. Other pixels, or hidden gems, in this piece include an image of Neo and Trinity back-bending in front of the green-screen and, my favorite: a small chunk of processed NYC road sludge, a primary material in Fall’s January show INANUTSHELL at Blade Study, pinned up like a pendant and a dry piece of shit.

Installation view of *HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT* at Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, New York

The idea of the pixel also allows Fall to contextualize the re-cycling of materials. Two assemblages in the second room of the gallery are dubbed pixels of previous works; in this world, to be a pixel is to be a part of something.

THE PALMTREE, one of two aluminum-cast assemblages, is flocked by a cross made from gridded strips from an Amazon box. Fall transforms material without hiding its origin, taking a horizontal approach: everything is up for grabs, here. The irreverence of using what’s quite literally around is offset by the relentless reverence of the craftsmanship, which feels in the lineage of weaving and other community, narrative art practices. The aluminum itself speaks to jello molds and retro futurist archeology, a cipher to the myth of the peanut moon that you’d have to dust off to find embedded in the ground.

What to make of the infinite churn? The inescapable digital-physical flipping of selves that, for many of us, is happening throughout every hour of every day. Fall’s answer is digestion– rather than solution–oriented. This is a digestion that continues—a reincarnative model of consuming, changing, and re-consuming. The associations are playful and winking; the and-and-and approach to meaning in this work is expansive, full of hope. If the formal elements of a work reveal its politics, Fall’s tell us that there are alternative ways of being to be made and found from this madness. Love and appetite. Hope without optimism: for building new systems through care and cross-pollination.

Pap Souleye Fall: HIDDENINPLAINSIGHT organized by Peter Kelly at Stellarhighway (Brooklyn, NY 11233) through March 15.

Pap Souleye Fall: The Infinite Churn

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