On Venus: Patrick Staff Serpentine Galleries, London, UK November 8, 2019 – February 9, 2020

eading to Patrick Staff’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery, I crossed Hyde Park on foot. Rain poured from an open, sunlit sky. A real rainbow arched over Winter Wonderland, the holiday-themed amusement park that occupies the royal lands over December, where empty rollercoasters rattled along and strains of Frank Sinatra drifted across the grass, serenading no one. Birds swarmed overhead; the river teemed with animal life; and I entered the Serpentine via automatic doors that may as well have been an airlock, sealing off the arid, burning hostility of from the wet and fertile Earth. Staff had transformed the ordinarily picturesque building with a number of architectural interventions that made up the site-specific work (2019)—first, transparent coloured panels arranged over the (2019), guarded the building’s entrance, cueing me into absorbing the building’s new atmosphere as one that was intentionally poisoned, potentially dangerous to forms of life.