Marta Riniker-Radich: Every home a fortress every hearth a blossom | The New Yorker
Nov 24 2016
The young Swiss artist’s quietly disturbing New York début pairs delicate colored-pencil drawings—of cupcakes and Easter eggs, isolated in stark domestic settings—with objects that evoke the cult of survivalism. Skeins of metal and plastic wire are looped into makeshift whips or nooses and displayed in vitrines, like relics; plastic buckets hang from the ceiling, distilling water in the manner of a conspiracy theorist who lives off the grid; texts from militiamen, found on an online message board, extol the virtues of boots, uniforms, and optical tools that aren’t “fake Chinese.” Riniker-Radich spent several years of her childhood on a U.S. Army base in Panama, and that may inform her interest in American isolationists, whom she evokes with a surprising balance of empathy and dismay.