Anna Kustera presents “Disappearing Acts,” an exhibition that showcases the work of three artists – Stephanie Campos, Troy Michie and Dominic Nurre – who romanticize the recent past and fetishize the art-making process.

Through collage and sculpture, Troy Michie conflates representational allusions of the past in order to redefine the present. Seeking to re-contextualize the existing arena of social institutions, he investigates the boundaries of desire, blending the borders of identification, culture, and sexuality. The complexity of race discourse has led him to examine the spaces that confine historical bodies both objectively and subjectively.

The stark “portraits” by Stephanie Campos of a chandelier and a vintage Victorian mirror evince an idealized glamour. They seem to simultaneously sparkle and fade before our eyes. Vanity and excess are elegantly addressed, and the works resound with poetic vigor. In her abstract painting “Sky”, heavy metal panels painted with blue swimming pool paint explicate a sensibility that would privilege the material over artist’s gesture and indict abstraction that reduces the art to mere mental exercises or decoration.

The “Glory Hole” partitions – sparse walls with suggestive openings and protruding rods – by Dominic Nurre are already becoming signature works. His transparent, Plexiglas version, of course, couldn’t function as a proper glory hole since it would not hide the identity of the person on the other side. Other works by Nurre hang from über-masculine chains that suggest construction sites and S/M environments in equal measure. In his video, the artist mines the active physicality of both the tree and himself, the threat of falling grows equal to the danger of the tree breaking. As he shifts his body weight, the glare of the sun obliterates the artist as climber, who reappears into view periodically.