9.18–10.24.2026

Tanya Brodsky & Darren Cortez
Modern Things

NOON Projects is honored to present Modern Things, a two-person exhibition by Tanya Brodsky and Darren Cortez. Working between material reality and inward perception, both artists attend to the quiet yet muscular power held beneath the surfaces of ordinary things.

Rooted in architecture and its many metaphors—for society, the body, the ways design touches us, and the ways it fails us—Tanya Brodsky’s practice examines the hidden systems and contradictions of the built environment. Although architecture takes the human body as its measure, it frequently alienates the very bodies it is intended to contain. Brodsky turns her attention toward fixtures, thresholds, and overlooked mechanisms: points of contact through which bodies encounter the systems and rules that organize daily life.

For this exhibition, Brodsky has cast the insides of spaces, producing sculptures from holes, insertions, gaps, and other architectural aberrations found within the Bemis Center’s residency building in Omaha, Nebraska. Her process begins by taking impressions of these cavities in bubblegum-pink, fleshy silicone, pouring brown Victory foundry wax into the molds, and casting the resulting forms in bronze and aluminum. The placement of the works retain a direct relationship to the building and to the body encountering them. Solid and severe yet fragmented, crumbling, and dripping, they preserve fingerprints and other traces of their laborious production.

The exhibition also includes photographic works printed on metal using images sourced from vintage issues of Progressive Architecture. Isolating corporate drop ceilings, bathroom systems, and other once-innovative design features, these pieces consider architecture’s recurring promise to improve daily life. Removed from their original contexts, the functional components are both earnest and faintly absurd, offering evidence of our persistent faith that another structure, mechanism, or material might finally make living easier.

Darren Cortez’s paintings possess a quiet, meditative energy. He begins each work in the woodshop, building stretchers to dimensions arrived at through instinct, often before knowing what image it will hold. The canvases may then remain in the studio for long stretches, waiting until an image begins to suggest itself. Like thoughts arising during meditation—or a photograph gradually appearing in a darkroom tray—their fuzzy, muted forms seem to emerge from within rather than being willed into being.

The images that surface move between the manufactured and the natural, drawing on ordinary things used to consume, build, and be disposed of: half-eaten fruit, screws, and cutlery. Enlarged and isolated on the canvas, these familiar objects loosen from their established functions to become sites of reflection and resistance, opening onto other systems of value, attention, and feeling. A hollowed fruit becomes an erotic bodily form; a screw or kitchen knife suggests the intimate infrastructures of domestic life, construction, and labor. Associations with agriculture, consumption, reproductive systems, and forms of labor that increasingly recede from view remain present without becoming illustrative. Tender, gently provocative, and unhurried, the paintings evoke looking without one’s glasses: aware of the periphery but freed from its details, able to focus only on the object before us.

There is a certain obviousness to the title Modern Things, borrowed from a song by Björk: the exhibition is filled with bolts, door handles, architectural systems, utensils, and other things associated with modern life. But the category begins to wobble around Cortez's fruit—something ancient and natural that is nevertheless cultivated, bought, consumed, and discarded as a commodity. Brodsky similarly looks at architectural features once presented as innovations, asking what remains when their promise of a better future has faded. Across both practices, useful objects become unfamiliar, intimate, and faintly funny. Here, “modern” remains deliberately unstable: a period, a style, a promise, or simply a way of looking. Suspended between function and form, figuration and abstraction, these familiar things remain both exactly what they are and something harder to name.

Exhibition

On View
September 18 – October 24, 2026

Opening Reception:
September 18, 2026
6–9 PM

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