Y Gallery New York presents Cosa (Thing), an object that gasps a big mouthful of thoughts as it inhales a breath of air from every city where it happens to visit. It lands in New York City this March after a world journey that has already include sojourns in Stockholm, Banja Luka, Miami, Madrid, Mexico City, and Köln. Cosa has been traveling since August 2009 inhabiting the negative space of several exhibition venues, never displaying its own full form.

Cosa, is the offspring of Argentinean artist Judi Werthein, who endlessly questions sociological and political aspects of her time. Cosa is an object intentionally made in China, where the global demand for products has strengthened their now robust economy. The artist ordered it through a phone call, Werthein’s simple parameters were the possibility to inflate it, and that the weight of the piece should be no larger than the one FedEx would carry.

Cosa is conceived as an entity that alludes to our immanent relationship with consumption. To exist, Cosa needs to inhale and exhale air from and for every public showing. When exhibited, it suggests a familiar pachyderm form, yet as it deflates it appears to be in the shapeless realm of the uncanny. It bluntly references to the ontological materiality of the artistic object, but also to the viewer’s unconscious and constant relationship with items of the daily life, that are so familiar, yet stay in the realm of the unacknowledged. As a thing, Cosa is an entity that exists in space and time; it is also an idea thought to have its own existence. It is both an animate and inanimate object, perhaps some kind of creature.

Cosa, confronts us with its vast tangibility as it inhales the air of Y Gallery to remind us of a particularity: that it is awaiting its inception into the economy of the art system.