Collected

Marvelous Maquettes, L’Rain’s New Album, and Pierre Huyghe’s Hallucinations

Written by Olivia Horn, Will Fenstermaker, Vrinda Jagota

August 21, 2026

What we’re obsessed with this week in craft and culture.

A paper cutout artwork pinned to a wooden wall, depicting two intertwined human silhouettes — one red and one blue with a polka-dot pattern — on a folded gray background.
Credit: Sascha Braunig, maquette for “Gemini” (2018). Courtesy of Dyer Rhoads.

A lesson in miniature

The summer group show is a bit of an art world trope; during the time of year when sales slow down, gallerists fill their walls with a mishmash of works and then set their out-of-office responders and make for Amagansett. But sometimes a little alchemy can happen, and the group show becomes a vehicle for quirky curatorial concepts and unexpected groupings. Such is the case at the Walpole Ontological Lab and Farm (opens in new window) (WOLF)—a project run by the artist Dyer Rhoads out of a farmhouse and repurposed barn in Walpole, Maine, which I visited during a trip earlier this month. This year, WOLF’s annual summer group show includes some 200 artists, many of them affiliated with Spindleworks (opens in new window) and other arts organizations that serve individuals with disabilities. The sprawl of the works and the idiosyncrasies of the installation—sculptures nestled on windowsills, video screens mounted in horse stalls, no wall labels or checklists to be found—piqued my curiosity and made the show feel like something to be sifted through rather than beheld.

I was especially taken with a handful of works by Sascha Braunig (opens in new window). The artist, who’s based in Portland, Maine, is known for vivid, saturated paintings featuring skeletal or silhouetted bodies, often with motifs evoking bondage or confinement. At WOLF, she’s showing a pair of oil-on-paper paintings of stretched and layered limbs in rainbow colors. I also spotted, pinned to the wall, a small, three-dimensional paper work of hers featuring a pair of cutout bodies that sprout as if from a magazine centerfold.

It turns out that Braunig usually makes maquettes like these as studies for her paintings (this one was for a 2018 painting, Gemini (opens in new window)). The forms—made out of paper, clay, wire, epoxy, and fabric—give the artist a sense of contour and shadow, which translate to more dimensionality in the details of her paintings, like draped fabrics and spindly armatures. “I think that this partial painting from observation lends a crucial graspable quality to the paintings that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” Braunig wrote to me in an email. “There’s also a strangeness that results from translating a small model, often under 15 inches, to a larger human-scale painting.”

I love this inversion of process; normally, I think of maquettes being scaled up into larger sculptural works, rather than compressed back into two dimensions. It reminded me that artistic practice is often much more fluid than it appears—like when a painter becomes a sculptor in order to circle back to painting.—OH

A hand holds a glowing block of ice with botanical sprigs and small pinecones frozen inside, backlit to reveal the plant silhouettes
Credit: Cover of L’Rain’s “fata morgana.”

L’Rain’s illusions

L’Rain’s music soundtracks one of my holiest rituals: the buzzed, solo late-night walk home. It’s on these walks, looking up at the way tree branches crisscross and the street lamps and the moon glow interchangeably, that my thoughts gallop along unencumbered, that my life feels both solitary and deeply interconnected with everything around me. L’Rain’s experimental electronic music—its looped vocals, snowy glitch, and heady ruminations on perseverance, grief, and reckoning with future and past versions of yourself all at once—makes everything feel impossibly beautiful, confounding, and limitless.

Her fourth album, fata morgana (opens in new window), came out just last week. It is named after the optical illusion in which mirages appear on the horizon, and is about interrogating your own self-image. Across a mix of distorted dancehall, gnashing punk, and starry synth compositions, she questions what she says, considers lives she’s never lived, and contemplates the gap between what is expressed and what is felt. There’s a sense of anxiety to this self-inquiry, but also, ultimately, freedom: When your sense of self dissolves, you’re able to become whoever you want.—VJ

A darkened circular gallery space with two large projected video works showing distorted figurative imagery, and an abstract line drawing on the wall between them
Credit: Pierre Huyghe, installation view of “UUmwelt” at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2018). © Kamitani Lab / Kyoto University and ATR. Photo by Ola Rindal and Alice Godwin. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine Galleries.

Garden-variety hallucinations

Pierre Huyghe’s UUmwelt is up through November 29 (opens in new window) on freestanding screens in MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, and it hits differently than it did when I saw the inaugural iteration at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2018. I doubt most museumgoers knew what a neural network was back then. Certainly very few had ever interacted with any artificial intelligence technology.

Eight years later, the premise is unchanged: Huyghe put volunteers in an fMRI scanner at a Kyoto lab, described a picture he’d like them to imagine, and tasked a neural network with reconstructing that image from the brain scans. The AI’s guesswork appears on-screen—thousands of hallucinatory near-guesses that never resolve into a clear thing. Something like a face or a landscape nearly forms, pareidolia sets in, and just as your brain completes the image, it’s gone.

At the Serpentine, a colony of bluebottle flies bred through the run of the show, their movement folded into a feedback loop between visitors and image. At MoMA, sensors track your gaze while noise is added via simulations of cancer cells mutating. Human, animal, and machine are wired into one system—the idea being that you experience the formation of some kind of new consciousness, or at the very least a new way of thinking and processing information. In 2018, that effect was bizarre and unlike anything I’d experienced. Today, it hardly seems so strange.

AI may be having its moment—and certainly it’s tempting to write off these mushy, morphing images as just more slop—but Huyghe’s interest is longstanding and worth taking seriously. Film lovers, head downtown to the New Museum, where Human Mask (perhaps his best-known work) is on view in “New Humans: Memories of the Future” (opens in new window) through August 30. In it, a macaque trained to wait tables at an izakaya north of Tokyo is filmed wandering an abandoned restaurant in a Fukushima ghost town, working her shift in a wig and a resin Noh mask. Or get to Basel, where the Fondation Beyeler has an enticing show (through September 13) of new and recent work, including Liminal, the real-time simulation that debuted in Venice and whose successor, Liminals, took over Berlin’s Berghain this winter as a kind of technohorror acid trip gone awry. A Noh mask traditionally depicts a supernatural being in the act of turning human. Huyghe’s art shows what’s behind the face.—WF


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