Kathleen McDermott: Not a Gadget

Kathleen McDermott, Urban Armor #09: 5 O'clock Alarm, 2019

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KODA in New York proudly presents the solo exhibition of Kathleen McDermott. Not a Gadget probes the artist’s conflicted relationship between the body and technology, spiritualism and cynicism, and her desire for both community and isolation. Through her decades-long practice of hacking and recrafting consumer electronics, McDermott develops systems that seemingly have agency, resisting control and participating as actors in spontaneous performances for the camera. A lapsed Catholic, McDermott explores the absurdity of manifestation, without ever truly disavowing the practice. Drawing from cybernetic theory, philosophy, and the malleable logic of the Looney Tunes, she veils her intentions through humor, but her efforts at hand-crafting machines bely an uncomfortable sincerity. A theme of anti-productivity runs throughout, a quiet protest to a quantification-obsessed work culture enabled by modern technologies as the artist shifts between observer/skeptic and active user of the tools.

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“The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.” — Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

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“The things we laugh at are closely related to the things that frighten us.” — Rowan Atkinson, Laughing Matters (London: Tiger Aspect Productions, 1992)

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Works on view include selections from Urban Armor (2014–2019), a series in which McDermott routinely intervenes in public space by making absurd kinetic props that expand, edit, obscure, and displace the person wearing them. Sometimes using the term wearable and often using biometric data, McDermott slips between lampooning the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley and presenting alternative ways forward, regularly creating tutorials and running workshops on DIY electronics.

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Also on view are artifacts from Repair Shop (2025), a six-week exhibit at Open Source Gallery in South Slope in which one side of the gallery was set up as a repair shop open to donations from the public, and the other side served as a showroom, featuring appliances from the artist’s home that could no longer perform their original functions but still had some working parts. Using techniques from puppetry and animatronics, McDermott made campy prosthetics for the broken machines, expanding on the parts that still functioned and engaging them in a dialogue about domestic work, motherhood’s impact on the body, and the labor of repair.

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In addition: How it Slips (2025), Rooms on Mars (2019), and Memorial for Bad Jokes (2016), all spanning sculpture, video and performance, as well as sketches and work-in-progress toward an environmental sensing performance piece, in collaboration with the advocacy group South Bronx Unite.