Vijay Masharani

Serial scenes of similitude and difference are appended together like beads on a string. The artist stares into the mostly dark, quasi-modernist, light-punctuated abstractions that bracket subway platforms in New York; a children's choir sings Für Elise over a rotating merry go round in which horses are replaced by physicalized versions of kids' drawings; a series of drawings is triggered by a barking dog, alternating between figuration and abstraction, showing a discontinuous subject, blinking in and out of existence, intermittently obliterated and reconstituted by glyphs, trace marks, and asemic writing.

A series of animated stars.

We plot a course through an exotic pet store in Fresh Pond, Queens, filming the fish tanks one-by-one on my phone before zooming in on a sign behind the counter bearing a nationalist epithet. We slip into a hallucinatory space, as the letters of the sign slide and rearrange to read one of three different words depending on which version of the video you catch.

The front of a wrecked 1983-88 Ford Thunderbird appears to have been set on fire. Placed by its rear left hubcap is a yellow canister. The front tires are deflated, and both the hood and the trunk are splayed open. Each passing car has been removed; their presence registers through their headlights and brake lights refracting off the broken glass on the ground and the body of the Thunderbird. A bald man wearing boot-cut jeans enters the scene, inspects the car, then leaves.

The title draws on Nietzsche’s comment on modernity as an experience of radical relativization in the cosmos: 'Since Copernicus man has been rolling from the centre toward X.' I became less interested in 'X' representing nothing or negativity, and so I made it crooked, with the letter 'K.' Which brought to mind 'being OK' as a state and a goal: we are familiar with oblivion (X), we read about it every day. How to get to 'OK' is a more challenging and interesting problem. There are five em dashes between O and K — a state of abeyance, like living while holding your breath. — Vijay Masharani

Urchin foragers filmed at Mavericks beach, California.

An enigmatic portal in a single order of scrambled eggs in the hematology ward at University of California, San Francisco.

Sheep and goats, brought in to clear dry brush in Belmont, California. They make quicker work of it than humans; this practice that is seeing increasing popularity as California faces annual wildfire threats.