Cady Noland

★★★★★

Cady Noland’s US is a violent, celebrity obsessed, consumerist police state. In this small show of big, stark, awkwardly cropped and blurry black and white images and minimal sculptures, the influential American iconoclast is dissecting her country’s cultural detritus, and leaving its splayed corpse on display.

You see celebrity heiress/terrorist accomplice Patty Hearst’s torso brandishing a machine gun; you see Lee Harvey Oswald being shot in the stomach; there are images of protests, Frank Sinatra, guns. Dotted around the space are crushed Pepsi cans and police badges preserved in resin, Coca-Cola crates, trays filled with metal scrap, empty display cases. It’s as if Noland is trying to analyse America’s collapse, piecing together the gory, gossipy, capitalistic pieces of a puzzle that keeps getting uglier.

Deeply unfriendly, minimal and stark … Cady Noland at Gagosian.…