The river of sludge will go on and on. It isn’t about me.

(Jackie Kennedy on tabloid stories, Newsweek [30 August 1994])

The entertainer is a collection of exercises around performance, idolization, and authenticity. Created between 2023 and 2025, this body of work is composed of paintings, garments, photography, and an installation featuring cardboard cutouts, jockstraps, and the idyllic bleachers and sports field of Hollywood’s American high school. Over the course of the exhibition, the gallery will be activated in three scheduled performances by the artist.

Aaron Michael Skolnick began his career amidst the reality TV revolution of the 2000s, creating investigative drawings of current events and public figures, particularly concerned with the charged imagery surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His subsequent bodies of work reflected a continued study of spectacle and disguise: daily studies of his late husband’s changing form and conceptual explorations of rural gay-male cruising. Most recently, Skolnick has developed potent textile and installation practices, constructing an environment for inquisition, familiar and absurd. It is both on this stage and beyond it that the artist performs, combining formula with spontaneity in a style that revels in humor and ridicule, adamantly not serious and yet undeniably pertinent.

The entertainer presents a merry critique of desperate and superficial obsessions, satisfied only by the presence of its essential audience. It examines how we choose to behave, and why. T-shirts are presented as demonstrations of mania, a dish upon which to serve the idealized object of one’s consumption. Choir robes confront the adoration of fickle fans. Skolnick reverently surrenders a hand-stitched suit, what was once a mask turned to anonymous relic. Paintings are sanded and blotted between layers of thinly applied oil paint, baring faces that shiver like reflections. The artist’s features dissolve into the expressions of Andy Kaufman, Eminem, Jackie Kennedy, Kurt Cobain, Lux Lisbon, and Sinéad O’Connor.

Skolnick is compelled by these individuals’ distinct reactions to their own idolization. Kaufman utilized celebrity to provoke unfiltered reactions, while Cobain fought against it, striving to present a true identity. Kennedy regretfully accepted her family’s role, remarking that her late husband was “a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.” Rapt by sensationalized tragedies and atypical provocateurs, we can’t help but doom the objects of our unchecked attention. We inevitably go to pieces when others go off-script. Acknowledging this greater interconnection, The Entertainer offers an invitation to improvise.

Aaron Michael Skolnick (b. 1989, Erlanger, Kentucky) holds a BFA from the University of Kentucky. Previous solo exhibitions include Under the eyes of a dry mountain at March (New York, NY), To drag the Earth with a sleepy rhythm, Ochi Projects (Ketchum, ID), Between two suns at March (Taylor County, KY), Your voice lying gently in my ear at Institute 193 (1B) (New York, NY), Feel it on their faith at Incident Report (Hudson, NY), A landscape that I know at Fierman Gallery (New York, NY), Running where we stand at Glacier Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and Pick me up and turn me round’ at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY) in 2013. He has been included in exhibitions at Venus over Manhattan (New York, NY), scroll (New York, NY), New Discretions (Hudson, NY), Atlanta Contemporary Art Centre (Atlanta, GA), KMAC (Louisville, KY), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum (New York, NY). Skolnick is in the permanent collections of the University of Kentucky Art Museum (Lexington, KY), the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, KS), and Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY). He lives and works in Old Chatham, New York. He has been represented by March since 2020.