SITUATIONS & NEW DISCRETIONS present
THE WORLD IS GARBAGE

Brian Belott, Raynes Birkbeck, Lucky DeBellevue, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Paul Gabrielli, Sanaa Gateja, Stephen Irwin, Kelly Jazvac, Ellen Jong, Matthew Kirk, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Paul Lee, Michael Mahalchick, Masamitsu Shigeta, Marianne Vitale, B. Wurtz

Sept 4 - Oct 18, 2025
Opening: Thurs. Sept 4, 6-8PM

SITUATIONS & NEW DISCRETIONS

515 W 20th Street, 3rd floor, New York, NY 10011

NEW DISCRETIONS & SITUATIONS are pleased to announce The World is Garbage. 

This group exhibition adopts a two-pronged approach in confronting the detritus of culture and mood, unpacking how artists build new worlds. At once material and metaphorical, this exhibition posits trash as both condition and critique. What is thrown away—and what it reveals—becomes a lens through which to see not only contemporary art, but contemporary life. Gathering works by a disparate collection of makers, the exhibition investigates assemblage and the readymade as both material strategies and as reflections of the darkening collective reality. 

The exhibition’s title acknowledges the overflowing realities of waste—environmental, cultural, and emotional—while also suggesting how garbage itself becomes a medium for artistic transformation. Their gestures are not only formal but also psychic: attempts to make meaning from fragments in a time when meaning feels perpetually under threat.

Lanigan-Schmidt is a key starting point here. As an artist who emerged from the “street rat” culture of downtown queer theater, he developed a strict strategy for what could be used in his art. His foil and cellophane reliquaries echo the sanctity of trash while also mapping a world of makeshift glamour, drawn from difficult beginnings. His presence underscores how assemblage can be not only a reflection of scarcity but also an engine of invention.

In Miss Born Again, Jong’s panties made from dried calligraphy ink embody the tension between religion, exposure, and raw intimacy. Stephen Irwin adds on and erases with his modified pornographic source material. Meanwhile, Kirk salvages abandoned basketball hoops, stretching them with used dropcloths from his studio, transforming castoff materials into reflections of an urban Navajo existence. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s Mine Your Own Business turns everyday objects—such as cigarette packages or crumpled cans—into live Bitcoin miners, using low-fi setups to question digital capitalism, colonial history, and the hidden costs of technology.

Wurtz and Jazvac transform found objects into artworks that straddle the boundary between material resourcefulness and conceptual inquiry. Belott’s reverse glass paintings revel in the banal, while Mahalchick’s raw interventions in everyday materials underscore the emptiness of consumerism. DeBellevue, Vitale, Gateja, Lee, and Shigeta all extend this lineage into the present, probing the instability between art and refuse, vulnerability, and reinvention. 

If optimism was once a latent promise in the found object—that the discarded might be redeemed through art—the works presented here instead capture an evolution. The works on view embody social critique, irony, and humor, but also persistence and imagination. This is not solely an exhibition about collapse or despair; it is equally about witnessing artists turning shit into diamonds.

SITUATIONS & NEW DISCRETIONS are both located at 515 W. 20th Street, 3rd floor. Hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment. For images or press inquiries, please contact jackie@situations.us or benjamin@newdiscretions.