Strewn a few darkish room are objects that recall the wreckage of a aircraft. As I investigated the scene of the disaster, I noticed fabric luggage holding battered steel beams and headlights or, much more ominously, nothing in any respect, their mouths frozen open like gaping voids. Glowing varieties resembling melted milk cartons present the one mild supply. The beaded tan-and-black carpet, manufactured from interlocking carseat covers, rattled and slid unnervingly underfoot, crunching like protesting snow. On the heart of the catastrophe is one thing that remembers an impromptu streetside shrine composed of a lone shoe, a gold watch, a dangling Guanyin appeal, and forged epoxy-resin molds of espresso cup lids illuminated like candles. Amid this stuff is a steel badge that reads “Licensed Taxicab.”
Kenneth Tam’s exhibition The Medallion at Bridget Donahue takes up the devastation of these whose lives have been shattered by the plummeting worth of the medallion, a allow to function a taxi that’s distinctive to New York Metropolis. Marketed by the Bloomberg administration as a method to “own a piece of New York,” these medallions appeared like a method to obtain the American Dream; greater than half of those that scrimped, saved, and went into debt to achieve them are immigrants. As soon as price about $1 million every, rideshare corporations like Uber and Lyft despatched values careening; in 2021, they have been price round $80,000 apiece.
Set up view of Kenneth Tam, “Collision” (2025), assorted discovered automobile particles, LED lights, ashtrays, males’s leather-based shoe, epoxy resin, gold retirement watch, cardboard field, blown glass fragments, taxi medallion, wood Guanyin hanging automobile appeal
On the far facet of the room is the sort of wide-format display that sits atop a taxicab. The title “Dissolved personal archive (2015–2024)” (2025) means that the pictures on this fast-moving slideshow are drawn from life — I noticed parks, galleries, home settings, even private particulars like what I assumed have been backpacks branded with the Heart for Artwork, Care, and Alliances brand — however a more in-depth look reveals them as AI-generated. In every slide, the human figures disappear into Refik Anadol-esque plumes of digital vortices; one generated determine appeared nearly to withstand this disintegration, staggering a couple of steps earlier than collapsing. The message is evident — tides of know-how wielded for private enrichment quite than societal enchancment will obliterate us with chilly ease. Nonetheless, the expertise is unsettling.
The 2-channel video “The Medallion” (2025), projected on reverse partitions, continues this critique extra elegiacally. In some photographs, individuals contort their our bodies as if swept right into a slow-motion tragedy; in others, they’re submerged, struggling towards a light-saturated floor, as if reaching for salvation. On this submarine context, the phrase “medallion” takes on an nearly mystical connotation, suggesting sunken treasure or pirates’ booty. After all, taxi medallions have been nearly as invaluable, vaunted, and uncommon, till they weren’t.
The projected video additionally includes a close-up interview with a person who poured his financial savings into buying a medallion earlier than they hemorrhaged in worth. It saved him up at night time, he stated; the debt, the curiosity had him flipping from one facet of the mattress to the opposite. On the ground in entrance of the video is “Anxiety Clock” (2025), a patch of these carseat beads rigged as much as glow crimson and flash between random numbers and nonsense symbols, like a hellish DMV the place your quantity won’t ever present.
Set up view of Kenneth Tam, The Medallion
Set up view of Kenneth Tam, The Medallion
Element of set up view of Kenneth Tam, “The Medallion” (2025), 2-channel HD video with sound
Kenneth Tam: The Medallion continues at Bridget Donahue (99 Bowery, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) by March 8. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.