The blank white wall that faces the viewer when entering the New York installment of this exhibition is no curatorial oversight. Rather, it is a component of an installation by artist Cassie Thornton (Psychic Architecture, 2017), its smooth drywall surface a bureaucratic metonym for the emotional walls that Americans erect when they negotiate the healthcare system. At once familiar and frustratingly ungenerous, the wall is a fitting mascot for this group show, organized by Taraneh Fazeli, which takes place in New York City with satellite events in Houston—two major hubs of finance and healthcare. The works and performances in “Sick Time” give a lived dimension to issues like chronic pain, exhaustion, stress, and laziness—a term that usually carries a great deal of racist baggage—and reveal how these things are bound up within the fabric of capitalism itself. As such, many of the pieces here are object-activity hybrids that let viewers confront their own physical limits.

Sondra Perry’s hacked stationary bike is wired in front of four chroma-blue TV screens that play a laughing and oozy deconstructed image based on her likeness; Danilo Correale’s No More Sleep No More, 2015, features a dressed bed that doubles as seating for a video he made while sleep-deprived, thus forming a kind of parallel litmus test for the viewer’s sleepiness. But Fazeli does not seek solutions in interactivity. Instead, programs such as publication releases (to inaugurate, for instance, the Canaries’ patient-centered resource guide for sufferers of chronic illness—an element from a larger three-part project called Notes for the Waiting Room, 2017, involving Jesse Cohen and Carolyn Lazard) and talk-backs make up at least half of this dual show, using social interactions as experiments for how well the art world can truly function as a sanctuary from the oppressive metrics of neoliberal capitalism. Never have these arguments for non-normative ways of measuring time felt so urgent.

— Katie Anania