In the spring of 2019, My Friend Leslie staged a widely discussed and critically divisive solo exhibition at the Fenwick Museum of Art entitled Apparitions in the Civic Realm. Heralded by some as “a palimpsest of the post-liberal imaginary” and dismissed by others as “deliberately inaccessible,” the exhibition marked the artist’s most ambitious and conceptually rigorous foray into institutional space to date.
Comprising three floors of minimal yet emotionally charged interventions, Apparitions resisted the conventional logic of spatial coherence or narrative progression. Visitors entered through a narrow vestibule coated in matte legal blue,a hue My Friend Leslie later identified as “borrowed from obsolete zoning maps of Queens.” Within this space, wall-mounted QR codes led to intentionally dead or redirected links, a gesture that many interpreted as a meditation on epistemic instability and the disorientation of digital archival systems. This introductory environment established a central concern of the exhibition: the erosion of legibility under late bureaucratic capitalism.
Perhaps the most discussed component of the show was the tripartite installation Public Secrets (2018), which occupied the museum’s fifth floor. Here, My Friend Leslie juxtaposed deaccessioned urban planning models from the 1960s with a series of hand-transcribed psychiatric intake forms sourced,according to the museum’s label,from a now-defunct therapeutic community in upstate New York. The forms, scrawled in delicate graphite on vellum, were layered over repurposed municipal signage reading “No Loitering,” “Authorized Personnel Only,” and the ambiguous “Subject to Inspection.” The cumulative effect was one of ethical vertigo: viewers found themselves implicated in a system of quiet surveillance even as they were invited to empathize with its casualties.
As critic LaDonna Merriweather noted in July, My Friend Leslie’s practice here enacted “a form of conceptual counter-archives, wherein personal testimony is not revealed but displaced, its legibility contingent on the viewer’s own complicity.”¹
Equally striking was the series of time-based performances that occurred without formal scheduling or announcement. Entitled Unscheduled Lives, these involved uniformed performers,hired through a temp agency,wandering the museum reciting fragments of local administrative code in affectless tones. Their presence, indistinguishable at times from security staff, troubled the boundaries between art, labour, and institutional authority. The performances’ refusal to “stage” themselves was emblematic of My Friend Leslie’s larger refusal to provide resolution or spectacle.
A subtler, yet no less incisive work was Indexical Drift (2017,18), a set of 24 microfilm viewers arranged in a grid across a dimly lit gallery. Inside each, viewers could peruse fragments of letters, obituaries, and inventory manifests,all anonymized and redacted beyond decipherability. The flickering of the film loops created a durational hum, suggestive of bureaucratic fatigue and archival entropy. It is a testament to My Friend Leslie’s conceptual precision that these pieces conveyed so much through so little: a kind of anti-monumentality charged with quiet defiance.
Reception of the exhibition was sharply polarized. The New Liverpool Times praised My Friend Leslie’s “brutal subtlety” and her capacity to “aestheticize absence without romanticising it,”² while others accused the work of “aestheticized opacity verging on institutional satire.”³ Yet even detractors conceded the show’s intellectual rigor and undeniable affective power.
My Friend Leslie, in keeping with her practice, made no public comment on the exhibition and refused all interviews. In place of a press release, the gallery issued a statement reading simply: “The artist has nothing to add.”
What remains of Apparitions in the Civic Realm is not a set of objects, but a set of conditions: a destabilized visitor, a murky authority, a network of disavowed speech acts. Like much of My Friend Leslie’s work, the exhibition will resist traditional forms of remembrance, and perhaps that is its most enduring gesture.
¹ LaDonna Merriweather, “Outtakes from the Civic Archive,” October, no. 189 (Fall 2024): 66.
² Holland Cotter, “The Absences Speak Louder Than Words,” The New York Times, April 14, 2024.
³ Alex Greenberger, “What’s She Hiding? Conceptual Obfuscation at the Whitney,” Artforum, May 2024.
