Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut), the first solo institutional show in New York by Anne Duk Hee Jordan, features an immersive installation that explores the communitarian possibilities and limits of human intervention. Drawing on static and time-based media as well as organic and inorganic materials, Jordan transforms the cavernous ground-floor space of the gallery Canal Projects into a habitat based on a true story of a single creature: Jeremy, a garden snail with a rare condition that made his shell coil to the left, rather than the right. Such snails, called sinistral snails or snail kings, can mate only with others whose shells curl the same way, so malacologists studying whether this trait is heritable turned to the internet to find a mate for e cause célèbre.
Jordan, who is known for exploring the relationships between the human and nonhuman and the organic and technological Snailing as a meditation on the search for a mate, and as in previous projects by the artist, Jordan’s process of world-building and storytelling is undergirded by explorations of play, pleasure, and connection. A substantial portion of the exhibition is given over to three music videos, commissioned from the musician Sasha Perera, in which lyrics that relay information about Jeremy sourced from the internet are overlaid on animated, collage-style videos of slugs and other wormlike creatures. The videos are presented on tablets set on the floor by planters full of live plants that face cushioned seating areas encircled by semitranslucent curtains, which, like Jeremy, coil to the left. These elements of the installation derive from children’s play areas: the songs are simple, the tune is easy, the setup is soft and welcoming. They are also a continuation of a long-standing convention of Jordan’s practice of displaying videos that present the gleaned knowledges of plant and animal kin in spaces designed for rest and comfort, as in the video work Ziggy and the Starfish (2016-2022), which catalogues a range of ways that underwater creatures reproduce as a model for how humans might also expand their gender and sexual horizons.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut), 2024 (installation view, Canal Projects). Image courtesy of the artist and Canal Projects. Photo: Izzy Leung.
In Snailing Jordan takes a slightly different approach, grounding the project in an ambivalent reality at the core of Jeremy’s story: he successfully breeds with another sinistral snail, but none of their offspring have shells that curl left. Jeremy’s usefulness to the machinations of science that he becomes part of remains rather opaque, providing no conclusive evidence on which to stake other research hypotheses about how other infrequently occurring traits, like certain diseases or disabilities, might be passed. Rather than drawing on the nonhuman for lessons about the human as the researchers’ project sought to do, Jordan retells Jeremy’s story to foreground love, an affective condition not often associated with the animal world, much less with more mucosal variants like gastropods. Jeremy’s story is thus recast beyond the reproductive imperative and neoliberal logic of discovery that brought him to internet fame in the first place, surfacing a vastly more ambivalent relationship between the human and nonhuman.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut), 2024 (installation view, Canal Projects). Image courtesy of the artist and Canal Projects. Photo: Izzy Leung.
This ambivalence comes through most forcefully in the tension between play and a sense of the sinister that animates the exhibition. The world Jordan has created at Canal Projects toes lines between light and dark, utopian and dystopian. The gallery is dimly lit with black and colored LED lights, the windows have been tinted, and two of the walls have been painted a rich dark blue for the occasion. But it is not the darker colors in the room that are the source of menace; indeed, some of the conceptually lightest elements of the installation come from the chromatically darkest areas, such as a several-foot-high pile of mulch gathered on a neon-green piece of Plexiglas and topped by a small tower of stacked pebbles. Instead, scattered throughout the installation are moments that seem a note or two off from the exuberant pitch that such a show might otherwise reach for, an effect that crystallizes nowhere better than in Perera’s songs, which play at a normal speed but feature voices that evoke the soundtrack of a theme-park ride played too fast. The chilling effect of these notes is compounded by low clouds of fog from a machine rolling across the exhibition; though often used to a campy, even comic effect, the artificiality does not detract from but rather enhances the unsettling ambivalence of the installation.
The sinister also comes through in several oblong, blob-shaped reflective surfaces laid on the ground and ringed with mulch or dirt, some emitting an electric-green aura, that are scattered throughout the gallery. These are satellites to a single, massive habitat at the back of the space, where rocks and dirt and logs define several distinct areas in which a handful of motorized snails made of heterogeneous mechanical parts slowly putter around, moving in jerky, unpredictable patterns. Two have ersatz mustaches that, like the mechanically produced fog, are comical but unsettling. The snails are the latest manifestations of a consistent throughline in Jordan’s practice of using discarded materials to build small anthropomorphic robots that perform repetitive or circular actions and periodically crash into one another. Like their predecessors, they suggest a futility that, in Jordan’s work, often indexes the human capacity to intervene in anthropogenic climate change. Puttering around back and forth in small, aimless motions, the robots distill the futility of the vast majority of efforts to intervene into the disasters of late-stage capitalism. This constitutes the real darkness in the show.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Snailing (Slippy slimy slug slut), 2024 (installation view, Canal Projects). Image courtesy of the artist and Canal Projects. Photo: Izzy Leung.
The crux of the exhibition, with its myriad, disparate parts, comes together in a selection of blown-glass sculptures, milky in color and several feet in length or diameter. The standout of these is an oblong, hollow form draped over a tree stump, an admixture of organic material and organicism that suggests the form of a snail without its shell. This could be read, in the direct context of the show, as Jeremy without the thing that, for better or worse, set him apart from the majority of his species. Jeremy may ultimately be central to this project not because he was different from other snails in a way he could not control, but rather because of how little his life mattered: after getting sucked into scientific discovery and successfully breeding with another snail, Jeremy dies at a relatively standard age for his species, the heritability of the trait that distinguishes both of them no more clear than it was when he was discovered. As proxies for the lifeless body of the creature around which this entire installation is ostensibly envisioned, these glass forms enunciate the imbrication of the human and nonhuman while gesturing toward the unidirectional effects of one on the other. Snailing ultimately suggests that, regardless of the myriad ways in which the nonhuman is central to the human, the extraordinary lengths to which humans go in the name of the liberal project of progress will always take precedence over all nonhuman life, and any project to intervene in that cycle offers at its best a fleeting and partial reprieve.
