Review: "No Footsteps Return" at RAINRAIN

The Cosmological Horror and Privilege of Existence

Chunbum Park

New York, NY

2025-07-30

Connor Sen Warnick - "Fainting" (2025)

Installation, hi8 transfer to digital, sound, color

There is the fear of ghosts. There is the terror of a nuclear blast. And there may be the slow horror of existence and being. The horror of dining at a restaurant. What are we? What is a human, and what is a table or a chair? Where does our food come from? Posthumanism conceptualizes that consciousness or awareness of being is not unique to humans or superior within the human form. Do we truly understand the implications of Posthumanist thought, which may lead to pseudoscientific beliefs like animism and reincarnation? What if the food that we are eating were our friends and family from our past lives? What if we are being watched by creeps masquerading as spirits or gods and goddesses?

At RAINRAIN, eight artists come together for a group show titled, “No Footsteps Return,” about the slow horror of existence in a universe that permits surrealistic combinations and possibilities for being and occurrences: Itziar Barrio, Enrique Garcia, Kosuke Kawahara, Phoebus Osborne, Tiina Pyykkinen, Frank Wang Yefeng, Connor Sen Warnick, and Echo Youyi Yan. The curator who organized the exhibition is Chiarina Chen, who exhibits strong interest in the intersectional knowledge of the sciences, religions, and philosophies at the periphery, including posthumanism and quantum physics.

Echo Youyi Yan - "Screen" (2025)

Pine, Douglas fir, resin, lace tablecloth, metal, papier-mâché, epoxy clay, salt

69 x 70 x 25 in (175.3 × 177.8 × 63.5 cm)

The slow horror of existence not only consists of the consumption of others but also the fact that everything in the universe can be reduced to information that can be observed and observer or being that also does the observing. There may be nothing in the closet, yet who is watching us? Is it a benign or spiritually profound entity? Or is it a monster masked as God or Buddha? It’s hard to say. The universe permits the possibility of monsters because it allows for any combination of objects and events, just like a computer or a multiplication table of possibilities of numbers: in other words, a fly can land into a soup, or a lamborghini can be scratched and bumped.

Itziar Barrio’s “was on low” (2023) is an automated, sculptural piece with internal moving parts that act and appear like an artificial heart pump. Powered by Arduino and consisting of a concrete body of assembled rock or slab-like forms in jet black and grey, the piece opposes the newness and the wholeness of iPhone and iPad’s curvilinear and glossy aesthetics. The presence of a computer chip and wires coming out of the eclectic body suggest a futuristic sci fi vision of a semi-robotic being or art form. We can easily imagine an archaic ceremonial or artistic practice within a religious or tribal setting, to imbue life and motion to this non-human form, to ultimately celebrate the possibility of life that comes in all forms, per the animistic and/or pananimistic principles. The work reveals the limits of human empathy, questioning our ability to understand and respect other beings that do not exhibit the same cognitive and bodily features as human or humanoid.

In Echo Youyi Yan’s “Screen” (2025), we see another manifestation of the posthumanist principle of belief that borders surrealism. Furniture arms serve as stretchers for veil-like fabric and stand on their own, developing feet-like bases made of plaster or paint-like accumulations. Can this be understood to be the final conclusion of the logic of the male gaze, which sees women as objects for viewing pleasure? Or is it just a terrible dream of finding oneself transformed into a piece of furniture? The furniture takes on an anthropomorphic quality, most likely being able to feel pain if it were broken into pieces by an external force. It is also asking us the question - are we being watched by the furniture and other objects, which come to life when we are not there? Is our reality basically just a literal interpretation of Toy Story? Are the objects equally subjects but we have failed to see their subjectivity due to its hidden nature beneath a facade of passivity?

Itziar Barrio - "was on low" (2023)

Concrete, spandex, rubber, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, motor, custom circuit board, led lights, electrical pipes and Laura Forlano’s insulin, pump alert data.

59 x 39.3 x 0.2 in (150 x 100 x 0.50 cm)

In Connor Sen Warnick’s analog video installation titled, “Fainting” (2025), we see a non-linear narrative of the artist’s experiences with fainting, which pushes the artist to deal with “psychic unknowns” and non-logical experiences of alterity in terms of consciousness and being. The television set projects scenes of the interior and the outside world, as well as people’s silhouettes and closeups. These images (and videos) are superimposed on top of one another and causing ghostly sensations and after images. The closeups in particular cause discomfort due to their abstract and aesthetically grotesque nature, which invite feelings of hidden monstrosity and flawedness regarding the human forms. This tendency is exacerbated by the repeated alternation or switching between the human flesh and the visuals of non-human beings, objects and phenomena, which form a link or association between the human and the non-human. The video piece can be understood as an exploration of a liminal state of being between full consciousness that is a linear product of controlled activity in the brain, and a state of being that is outside the human being. In this state, the past becomes the future, and the present is a mysterious place that rejects logic and causality. 

What is time? What is a place? Perhaps we the particles had neither time nor place, but, right before the big bang, we negotiated a language of communication and interaction, which necessitated that we synchronize and move towards the “future” direction in terms of spacetime. Perhaps we are already in free fall at or near the speed of light, and the illusion of time is a middle ground between time flashing by in an instant and time stopping to a complete freeze - between 0 and infinity, both of which are essentially infinite concepts.

Why do the spirits want us to live? Why do we choose to be born and to live? Perhaps life and existence itself are a profound privilege and similar to poetry. I want to become a butterfly. I want to become a cloud. I want to become a flower. And I want to be a human.

The greater horror would lie within the power to live forever, without changing form or developing spiritual attainment through new experiences and lives. There is great privilege endowed to us as humans despite the terrible nature of our existence. In spite of the flawed nature of humans, we can still choose to live, do good, and love and cherish each other.

The sausage may be talking to us. The sausage becomes a part of us. Then the parts and the leftovers of the sausage exit us into the toilet after some time. We are the sausage in our previous life, before we enter our parents’ systems as nutrients and become the egg and the sperms. This is the cycle and the violence of life. This is the slow realization of the horror that exists inside the closet of the universe’s hidden secrets. Yet, in some ways, it is meaningful and profound. This horror simultaneously offers us the pathways to become good and fully human… or rather, posthuman. The horror necessitates that we beautify and to do good in the world. 

Therefore, the pig in the animal farm may feel sad to be slaughtered and packaged into a sausage form, but the sausage shouldn’t feel too sad. It will be eaten by humans with the potential to be reborn as a human. That is the cycle of life. That is both the horror and the karma of life. This is the cycle of life and justice itself. And this is the cosmological horror and privilege of existence.