Our relationship with images has never been more expansive, nor more exhausting. The camera in everyone’s pocket means that almost every corner of the world has been documented every way you can think of. But as we’ve hit peak visual saturation – and as AI now generates hyperreality – have we gained any new insight? The world as it is now may be fully described, but it doesn’t mean we understand it any better.
That confusion is explored by L.A.-based artists Peter McRury and Rosie Clements in their joint show “Surface Tension,” at McLennon Pen Co. until July 26. Clements’ UV-printed photographs on bubble wrap and McRury’s diffuse airbrush paintings on linen both focus on medium and its powers of distortion.
Clements’ bubble wrap is textural, obscuring the image at close range and dimensionalizing it from afar. There are wonderful moments of physical disruption, like a popped bubble or a wrinkle in the sheet, that have come to characterize her often funny work. It’s a clever way to challenge photography’s potential for the hyperreal, opting instead to constantly remind the viewer of their physical space by printing the image on a bumpy, broken, less legible object. Her choice of subject here is more intentional than in past work – instead of sun-kissed poolside L.A. butts and neon-lit nightlife characters, it’s discarded objects. Sans the figure, the work feels lonelier, more sober, and more intentionally interactive with its medium.
Per the artist’s statement, the objects she chose to photograph for this show are related to her personal life: a bouquet from her wedding, the ring itself, a thong, a vibrator, Zoloft. “Bubble wrap arrives cradling our purchases,” she writes, “holding the object of our desire for a moment before it’s torn off and thrown away.” That many of these desired objects are meant for instant gratification lends a flippant air – discarded gas station Cheetos and the like draw attention to the medium as a disposable packing material, associated with overconsumption. But Clements puts them right alongside the most precious and symbolic of her own possessions.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition that plays intentionally with Clements’ unique gimmick, but without reading the statement, some of the images are so ubiquitous that the personal meaning is unclear. A decontextualized photo of light blue American Spirits and a bottle of Lambrusco land as flat as an advertisement. Perhaps this is the point: to examine our contradictory relationship to objects, their inherent vapidness and their symbolic potential, wrapped up in packaging both disposable and protective.
While Clements’ bubble wrap grounds her photographs in the physical world, McRury’s airbrushed acrylic is barely suggested, devoid of any reference to its medium, which has a distancing effect that places the images somewhere in the mind’s eye. It’s refreshing to see an airbrush artist move the medium beyond where it has been since 2020, when fine artists began rediscovering its associations with kitsch, novelty graphic tees, hip-hop, and kids’ carnivals to gesture toward a street-wise, irreverent sensibility that bolstered the art world’s neurotic attempts to compete with the power and relevance of memes.
By contrast, McRury’s airbrush is not self-conscious; it’s deeply sincere, the color palette earthy, moody, almost Old Master-y. He manipulates digital images of Super 8 footage from internet archives so that a horse is artificially squeezed, like the most tasteful deep-fried meme you’ve ever seen, then renders it with the thinnest, most translucent amount of airbrushed acrylic so that the outline of the image is seemingly burned into the canvas rather than painted on top of it. It’s kind of photographic in nature. In one standout piece, Graze, McRury evokes sunlight hitting a horse as swooningly as your most vivid memory. It’s as if Rembrandt had Photoshop and had seen a lot of Robby Müller movies.
McRury has a clear interest in twins and duos. In Obstruction, two faces blur and stretch together – echoing the uncanny Innocence, which depicts a Dolly-esque conjoined sheep emerging out of the darkness. In Still Horse, the animal’s reflection continues this theme, and two swans reflect into four in Evening Pond. If the work is about digital manipulation, perhaps McRury is gesturing toward the slipperiness of the “original” on the internet, as images proliferate into a copy of a copy.
Both McRury and Clements have unique powers of observation when it comes to the tension between the medium and the message, and that is only going to become more relevant as artists respond to the breakneck evolution of our tools for translating reality. The more they can do it by maintaining an interest in the message – aka, the part that gets lost online – the better.
Surface Tension
McLennon Pen Co.
Through July 26
This article appears in July 3 • 2026.