Flash Art
Daily Serving

Borna Sammak’s second solo exhibition at JTT consists of a cultural pastiche of corner delis, boardwalk souveni- res and typography from Hardcore bands. In an extension of previous work, familiar and innocuous vinyl signage is mixed to create bodega poetry. A yellow awning reads ”Produce, Deli, Seafood, Meat”—a list has been transformed into an imperative sentence (which is to say that a type of seafood meat that is “deli” might be for sale here). In his “Beach Crap” series, Sammak cuts up heat-press applications and overlays them in varying opacity to create topographic assemblages of perverse and adolescent humor. One work consists of embroidery on vinyl, which is made by both found and drawn images that are fed through an embroidery machine and layered on top of one another. To its left a video recalls his earlier work with looping interfused found and made imagery. Sammak’s exhibition is as much about the abject failure of lan- guage as it is the chewed and spit-up nature of the work made by the world’s most proli c, faceless artist; an artist that All Dogs are Pets forces us to imagine. The designer of t-shirt graphics galore, the applier of vinyl signage, locked anony- mously in some hell-dungeon in Queens creating brand “gold” (sic.) for virtually every deli, 99¢ store and bargain t-shirt dumpster on the planet. Gimpy found poems and re-canned signage are given a second chance to die, but not before Sammak crafts each an uncomfortable new casket.