Open Source Gallery: Current Exhibition

Kathleen McDermott: Repair Shop

April 12 – May 25, 2025
Gallery Hours: Thurs + Fri: 4 – 6pm, Sat + Sun: 2 – 6pm

Open Source Gallery is pleased to present Repair Shop, an exhibition by Kathleen McDermott.

Repair Shop turns the gallery into an experimental space for considering the lifespan of objects and when they are assigned “value,” especially in the context of work. Encouraging audience engagement and collaboration, Repair Shop will evolve over the period of the exhibition.

One side of the gallery is set-up as a showroom, featuring appliances from McDermott’s home that can no longer perform their original functions––a sewing machine that doesn’t sew well, a blender that leaks motor fluid––but that still have some working parts. Using techniques from puppetry and animatronics, McDermott has made strange, campy attachments for the “broken” machines, expanding on the parts that do work, and giving them new use. The bright pink showroom borrows from 1950’s advertising tropes of domestic appliances, where machines were described in terms of gender labor, and sold with a promise of domestic productivity. 

The other side of the gallery is set-up as an absurdist repair shop. Community members are invited to donate formerly precious electronic objects and other heirlooms for “repair.” If an object is accepted, the owners will be asked to acknowledge that the form and function of the object will be significantly altered. In advance of, and over the course of the exhibition, McDermott and a rotating list of invited artist-collaborators, including Kayla DesPortes, Liza Stark, Van Tran Nguyen and Monica Duncan, will rework found and submitted objects, combining them with paint, fabric, motors, and inflation, to produce a cast of object “characters,” that will dialogue around questions of work, value, and the labor of repair.

Kathleen McDermott is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in installation and sculpture. She combines her knowledge of fabrication with open source code and hardware to build a language of absurdity that merges new media, design, performance, and video. She is interested in technologies that extend and highlight embodied knowledge, and that challenge narrow conceptions of use, waste and productivity. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, The Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, the Wende Museum in LA, and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; and has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Fast Company, and Dezeen. She is currently an Industry Assistant Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in the Integrated Design & Media Program.

Collaborators:
Kayla DesPortes
Liza Stark
Van Tran Nguyen
Monica Duncan
Divya Gadangi
Ilana Harris-Babou
Edward Yujoong Kim
Lorca Yu
Jess Zepeda

Learn more at Open Source Gallery.