Mika Rottenberg’s unsettling videos - eccentric characters manning absurdist assembly lines - have already earned the artist fans, thanks to standout pieces in group shows over the past year. For her first solo show in New York (one large-scale video installation and a selection of drawings), the young artist ups the ante on her signature format, drawing an unnerving analogy between dough and the human body.  

The video is set in a claustrophobically small, distinctly low-tech dough-packaging factory, where decorative touches - bunches of flowers, piles of towels, spray bottles - also suggest a beauty salon. As it is massaged by women in tidy uniforms, the dough clearly stands in for flesh. But far from evoking the pampered form of a spa client, the dough assumes the shape of the workers¹ bodies: An obese woman at the head of the line kneads globs of the stuff, as voluminous as her own flesh, into a skinny rope that she then passes into the elongated hands of a tall, thin woman.

Rottenberg renders grotesque both dough and flesh, baking and beautification. But fantastical moments lighten the pervasive sense of disgust. In one scenario, a woman sniffs flowers to which she is allergic, and her falling tears keep the rising mixture moist. But it is the abject subject matter of the artist’s drawings - which echo the video’s references to beauty parlor workstations, but also feature projectile vomiting, vats of yellow liquid and swarms of disembodied, snapping jaws - that laces this auspicious and entertaining solo debut with menace.

-Merrily Kerr