Fever Dream

These days, the archive can be anything: a browser tab, a social feed, a porn site, a family hard drive. In Fever Dream, curated by Palo Gallery director Sascha Lewit, most of what emerges is gorgeous. Even the ugly stuff.

Danny Sobor airbrushes voyeuristic moments and pornography from the 1970s and ’80s into an orange-and-green haze. He’s looking at porn but doesn’t want us to see what he sees. The pleasure is there, but hidden.

Amin Yousefi frames a journalist's photographs of protesters during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 in halftone vignettes, so we peer at them as if through a peephole. But the protesters look right back at us.

Andrea Orejarena carves a life-size Big Mac in Carrara marble. In place of the beef, a mini TV loops clips of American actors biting into burgers. To watch it, you have to bend over and peer in. A little private indulgence. A guilty pleasure, set in stone.

Then Zion Estrada’s Grief Box 48 (2026), a metal hospital-like trolley topped with red, parched earth, invites you to lean in and tell it about your grief.

A screen set into the dirt plays fractured footage of Pruitt-Igoe, a St. Louis public housing project sold as a Modernist vision of the future. Its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, would later design the World Trade Center.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Army secretly sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide over the predominantly Black housing complex, to study how particles might spread in a biological attack.

A utopian dream. A military experiment. Families made sick by it. The building was demolished in 1972.

I cried.

Sascha Lewit is a New York-based curator, director of Palo Gallery, and recent NYU graduate. Fever Dream brings younger artists into conversation with Richard Prince, who's also in the show. Prince helped turn image-stealing into an art form. These artists grew up in a world where everything is already screenshotted, saved, remixed, and reposted. Borrowing an image is second nature. What you do with it is another matter.