Road kill has a funny way of putting things in perspective: humankind’s imposition on the natural environment; the inevitability, even banality, of death; the curiosity of our morbid curiosities; and the rather surprising place we’ve come to occupy in the scheming grandiosity of things. Cutting through the tree line of a mountain in upstate New York, route 44/55 is as good a place as any to get an eyeful, if not a trunk-full, of the dubious relationship we humans have managed to get ourselves into with dear old Mother Nature.

For the exhibition 44/55, artist Adriana Farmiga applies her cunning object selections/combinations and pinprick formal vocabulary to the havoc-wreaking travesty of the American Highway System. Drawing from the language of happenstance roadside sculpture, 44/55 butts playfully dark wit against the horrific realities of what we’ve done to our planet and the ludicrous ways we’ve gone about celebrating it. For example: a double deer garden statue split by a no-pass double-line road marking, or waiting patiently for death atop a scattering of playing cards, intones the burden our abstractions place on animal life, the pleasure – to the point of kitsch – we derive from representing the bucolic, and the dumbness of luck that makes the whole world kin.

The road compresses the profundities of travel by generating an abstraction of the relationship of point A to point B. Farmiga’s knack for coalescing wry humor and existential crises through smart scale shifts, punctuations of color, tense balance, and an adamant economy of means finds a deserving subject in the dialectic of 44/55. This body of spare work is anything but modest and goes a long way toward announcing the newly renovated La Mama Galleria as an art space to be reckoned with.

-Alexander Seth Cameron