“The Book of Hours,” the title of Christian Holstad’s debut at Andrew Kreps’s new location, is painted across the gallery’s front doors, a cue to visitors that they are stepping into an allegorical space—a loose, modern take on the eponymous medieval manuscript used as a daily prayer manual during the fifteenth century. Inside, a garden of soft sculptures, wielded from crocheted yarn, twisted towels, bent wire, and other textural flotsam, spreads across the space. Holstad intersperses more bucolic works—a tree stump, a bush of flowers, even a flock of pecking chickens (their feet expressively fashioned from yellow gloves)—among works that seem more coeval with today: A series of trashcans hang off one wall, facing a room full of assemblages that evoke an abandoned stroller and a pile of soiled adult diapers among other works. The result is a realm simultaneously reminiscent of the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, at once pastoral and urban.

A back room, accessed through a curtained doorway, provides an intimate fort for viewing the gems of this exhibition—more than a dozen drawings made from erased pages of a newspaper. Here, Holstad reduces headlines to words like BELIEVE and INEVITABLE; advertisements and photographs are rubbed out, becoming cryptic imagery. Within the context of a now ancient book, his use of newspapers is telling. Being a devotional, The Book of Hours guided the direction of one’s day, absorbing individuals in a common ritual. In many ways, this book—one of the most popular of its time—greatly contributed to the formation of a collective cultural imagination. In a similar vein, a newspaper binds sundry demographics with a common set of information about the issues and events that shape daily life while also engendering a daily routine that could be thought of as quasi devotional—and yet it is a waning medium. At play here is a history of shared consciousness, which, set against this dystopic garden, raises questions about rituals of our present time and precisely what binds us today—Holstad’s answer seems very muddied indeed.

— Emily Weiner