Joe Bartram, Silver Bunny, Dummy at DISPLAY, Parma

We remember the rabbit before we remember ourselves.
A cartoon creature, suspended in perpetual hunger.
A cereal box withheld. A slogan repeated.
“Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!”

Standing at the threshold of Silver Bunny, Dummy, we ask: when did desire become scripted? When did longing learn its lines from television? Bartram’s exhibition greets us not with nostalgia, but with the residue of it , bright, smooth, seductive forms that seem to smile while withholding something darker. We enter as viewers; we remain as implicated participants. The air feels charged with recognition.

Inside DISPLAY, the space unfolds like an analog screen. The works are positioned with deliberate rhythm, each object holding its ground while glancing sideways at the next. There is a choreography at play, candies, cartoon echoes, architectural fragments, toy-like police batons, taxidermied chicks rendered uncanny, each element suspended between amusement and quiet threat. Visitors move cautiously, almost playfully, tracing the logic of repetition and exaggeration that structures the installation. The room feels at once theatrical and forensic.

Bartram’s sculptures, derived from Styrofoam copy castings, carry a particular tension. These are rubber impressions taken from packaging waste, the negative molds of mass production. Materials usually destined for invisibility return as presence. What once protected commodities now becomes the commodity. Smooth surfaces gleam in color or sink into darker tonalities; they attract the eye even as they whisper of disposability. We sense the ghost of the industrial process in every contour.

This transformation is not mere replication. These forms are not copies of originals; they are imprints of circulation itself. The artist manipulates figures drawn from American consumer life, Haribo candies, cartoon characters, architectural models,  building a visual grammar rooted in familiarity. Yet the familiarity curdles. Repetition becomes incantation. Play becomes discipline. The exhibition reveals how spectacle operates as an epistemic force, shaping not only what we want, but how we perceive and remember.

There is irony here, but it is edged. The smiling mascot becomes anesthetic. The toy baton carries institutional weight. Ecological damage and emotional desertification hover beneath the sheen. Bartram stages cultural capitalism as a dream factory still humming, though its foundations crack. Freedom, individualism, progress,  these ideals appear as props, endlessly reproduced, drained of lived urgency.

We find ourselves entertained. That is the trap. The works delight in color, in scale, in the absurd juxtaposition of forms. Yet beneath the delight lies a steady critique of how entertainment standardizes pleasure and defers agency. In the current climate of surveillance, polarization, and ecological neglect, the spectacle continues to scroll before us, frictionless and bright. Bartram slows it down. He solidifies it. He makes us confront its residue.

What lingers is not a single image but a texture: the imagined touch of smooth rubber standing in for brittle foam; the silence beneath cartoon laughter; the afterimage of a rabbit forever denied. The dream factory, we sense, has shut its doors. What remains are these fragments,  seductive, toxic, undeniable. We step back into the street carrying their echo, unsure whether we have exited the screen or merely changed channels.

-FW