Continuing through April 30, 2026
At a moment when the entire globe seems to have jumped off a cliff but not yet hit the ground, Rachel Simon Marino’s exhibition of nine new paintings titled “Running on Air” focuses on that very moment of suspended catastrophe. These works are imagined in a fantastical realm sourced in the debilitating, hallucinatory migraine episodes Marino endured as a teenager — specifically with her attendant Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, a rare neurological condition that distorts perception, causing people to see objects or body parts as smaller, larger, closer, or farther away than they actually are.
Marino’s paintings focus on innately comical moments, as dark as their imminent catastrophes might be. The unpainted motif might be the image of Wile E. Coyote suspended beyond the cliff’s edge, legs frantically pumping in the moment before he plummets hilariously into the abyss below. Marino presents a portfolio of such ominous but absurd disasters in their impending moments, some improbably combined for multiple whammies of tragedies about to occur: power strips bobbing in surging waters as multicolor bricks tumble from an unidentified edifice, as legs scramble for steady ground just as they are about to be entangled in the cables and broken furniture being swept out by the current. A car, overloaded with what look like cheap cardboard boxes obscuring the face of the driver, careens into a picket fence, jettisoning over the hood a flamboyantly dressed figure in opulent taffeta, kicky sixties-era boots, and long gloves. The colors in “Running On Air” are straight out of Disney’s “Fantasia,” and even the wheels of the car in “Ooooh Mama!” have gone full Loony Tunes, warping expressively into the crash.
Marino never shows the faces of her doomed figures. The focus is not on depicting her victims’ final thoughts as they face their demise. The only face we see is that of a dog in “Oz,” cartoonishly anthropomorphized into a very undog-like expression of fear at the flames licking up from where its leash is tied. If this is Toto, the human figures are more like Benny Hill bit players whose slapstick antics end in very real tragedies. Even the visible hands of some subjects are stripped of expression as they don blue surgical gloves.
In “Curtain Call” a stylized proscenium arch frames another surreal calamity, armchairs beginning to sink into onstage puddles filled with choppy water and floating orange yoga blocks. The audience’s blue-gloved hands clap in the foreground, several steps removed from what they witness: they have no faces, what they’re watching is senseless, and they’re applauding a climax not yet reached. Even their latex-covered hands are prophylactically removed from what they experience.
The paintings in “Running On Air” are more about the consumption of the spectacle of disaster than the experience of it. In this way, despite their psychedelic sheen and trippy situations, they do not seem so unrealistic or foreign when you consider that both personal and global catastrophes gain recognition or fade into obscurity on the strength of their virality. This is often a factor of aesthetics and timing rather than the event’s substance, consumed and therefore known by people safely spectating on a screen they could turn off at any time. The point is that we are all watching and cheering, or applauding through latex gloves, but the people experiencing those cataclysms remain unknown and unperceived, their experience of their own doom disappearing with them.
