“Am I cleaning a small room or a large room?” asks the Scooba 450. Painting in the mega Hollywood format of Alex Israel’s airbrushed skies while channeling the bad British weather of JMW Turner. Late Turner found and lost in the spinning brush and lubricating/sucking action of a floor scrubbing robot. In Borrowed Light, Dead Salmon, Mole’s Breath and other colours selected from Farrow & Ball’s menu of “estate emulsions.” Somehow recognizing the grunting, senile-visionary late late Turner in the iRobot’s drone-like way of attacking the canvas or sky like any bathroom floor. A weather report in paint, a flood warning transmitting estate emulsions.

In 2004, the New York-based artist Reena Spaulings emerged from the daily operation of an art gallery (Reena Spaulings Fine Art, founded by John Kelsey & Emily Sundblad) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Often playing on the double-identity of art dealer and artist, Spaulings’ work undermines professional divisions of labor and disciplinary hierarchies, while interrogating accepted notions of individual authorship and agency.

For her first solo show «The One & Only», 2005, Reena Spaulings presented a series of hybrid painting/sculptures in the form of wall-mounted flags. Using the kind of readymade flagpoles commonly seen on suburban American house fronts and small New York business-fronts, this gesture could be read as more of an occupation than an installation, claiming a territory in another dealer’s Chelsea gallery in order to problematize the protocols by which dealers «represent» artists and their work.

Reena Spaulings has also produced publications, performances and underground dance music. Reena Spaulings Fine Art is located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.