PARTICIPANT INC takes up temporary headquarters at RENTAL with the exhibition Office Party, including works by Eric Heist, Lovett/Codagnone, Diana Puntar, and Børre Sæthre. Also on view in the Back Room portion of the exhibition will be works addressing work, workplace, and works available by Stephen Andrews, Matthew Antezzo, Michel Auder, Lutz Bacher, Robert Boyd, Kathe Burkhart, Robin Graubard, Michael Lazarus, Virgil Marti, Laura Parnes, Luther Price, Adam Putnam, and Shellburne Thurber.

Especially for Office Party, Diana Puntar fabricates necessary furniture (desk and mini-bar) in a stylized stone wall pattern of ubiquitous materials. Puntar’s sculptures, made from supplies common to American homes, dramatize our culture’s eager acceptance of synthetic, disposable imitations of the real-in terms of nature, wealth, and the new. Natural forms, rendered in layers of plywood with surfaces such as aluminum mirror, laminates, lucite, sit like tree branches, rocks, and logs, and insinuate a peculiar, faux three-dimensionality. Her simulated “outside” alludes to the fear that there is no longer an exteriority to pursue in American culture-we are trapped inside, and whether it’s an office cube or the back yard, “good fences make good neighbors.”

Also made for the occasion of Office Party, Lovett/Codagnone combine vinyl text and black painting on mirror to starkly confront the viewer with an unwholesome byproduct of failed aesthetic compulsion. They reference the iconic cautionary text from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a fragment of Jack’s anticipated masterpiece of several hundred pages: “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” Part of a new body of work, their mirror pieces expand upon the collaborative team’s interest in the political ramifications of conflating public and private-but depart from self-reflexive strategies to issues of collective identity. In addition to mirrors, works in the series deploy items such as the American flag and police barricades, rendered uncharacteristically black, to imply a fetishization of power in relation to a collective that must be controlled or, in this case, put in front of a mirror.

Eric Heist’s works from his 2005 project Travel Agents (Desk and Posters, Africa) simulate furniture and props based on a ubiquitous travel agency. Pinned to a bulletin board, posters of exotic locales are inscribed with names of US military operations associated with them; and going behind the corporate desk reveals a diorama of a shrouded figure couching in an ashen landscape. Heist’s agency seeks to make apparent the direct relation between the hidden consequences of Western military and economic power and the leisure industries they uphold.