The artist Roxy Paine has taken on the CIA’s use of LSD on non-consenting civilians in his two-part solo show Farewell Transmission (2 May-1 July) in Paul Kasmin Gallery’s spaces on Tenth Avenue in New York. As part of a mind-control experiment in the 1950s and 1960s—dubbed Operation Midnight Climax—the CIA hired prostitutes to lure civilians to safe houses in New York and Los Angeles, where they were drugged with LSD and observed by agents behind two-way mirrors. Paine’s diorama, entitled experiment (2015), is a small-scale model of one of these set-ups—a “nondescript, could-be-anywhere motel room” seen through a two-way mirror, which feels “as if the homo sapien is being observed” in a museum vitrine-like display, says the gallery’s director, Mariska Nietzman. The eerie work even has rumpled bedsheets, deceptively executed in wood.
