Katie Anania reviewed Machine Dazzle’s exhibition at The University of Michigan Museum of Art for Artforum:
The Ouroboros—an ancient symbol that depicts a snake eating its own tail, representing the cycle of creation and death and the unity of all life forces—took center stage in Machine Dazzle’s exhibition, titled after this creaturely emblem. . . [The show] demonstrated how queer life might teach us how to approach the future, starting with Dazzle’s tender, collaborative excavation of humanity’s garbage footprint, which has its origins in the ill-defined, yellow-black sludge of the fossil fuel industry.
Dazzle’s show—a tribute to the queer ethos of making something really fabulous out of nothing, really—was also an elegy to the failed dream of the recycling industry, which for decades promised to rescue select single-stream waste objects and transform them into shiny new pieces of the consumer economy. His art is a form of survival strategy, a solution for living in a world drowning under a malignant amount of novel and easily disposable stuff. The planet, alas, is covered with shit—but if we follow Dazzle’s lead, maybe we can use it to create something beautiful.