Francisco Goya’s The Straw Manikin (1791–92) presents a carnival custom: a group of four women tossing a helpless male dummy into the air. Characteristically for carnival traditions and for Goya’s paintings, this ostensibly lighthearted scene is suffused with violence. The tight smiles on the women’s faces evoke a shared complicity, the straw doll’s neck appears to be broken from the game, a fantasy is being played out.
At Den Frei—Denmark’s oldest artists’ association, well known for its collaborative ethos—Amy O’Neill unpacks what the carnivalesque means today by uniting themes of production and performance, celebration and corruption. Installed near the entrance is STRAW MAN Vestment (all works 2025), one of three works which isolate Goya’s limp doll. Made of quilt tops and digitally printed fabric, O’Neill’s piece transforms the tortured figure into a prêt-à-porter object. The garment anchors the show, allowing the sightlines and angles that the artist creates around it to feel carefully measured.
Curated by Laura Gerdes-Miranda, in partnership with Line Ebert and Gianna Surangkanjanajai, the show features large-scale drawings, bespoke outfits (such as chasubles embellished with silkscreen imagery or iron-on transfers, snaps, and ribbons, along with papier-mâché masks and rope belts), and an analog slideshow. O’Neill brought all of the work to Copenhagen in suitcases instead of crating and shipping, and her ecologically minded ethos carries into the show’s design, which involved keeping and cutting through some of the previous exhibition’s black box theater to create a checkerboard pattern and a structure for hanging the works. Upon entering the show’s opening night, I was struck by the sparseness of the space, which made the black-and-white pattern starkly obvious. I watched the mesmerizing cinematic slideshow—eighty-one sequenced pictures of various people in the diverse garbs and related imagery—flanked by two drawings depicting flailing bodies combined into one.
Dressed in handmade vestments, masks, accessories, and white gloves, several participants slowly descended into the basement space via the stairs. O’Neill led the charge, wearing PINK BELLIED CAPE LOOK becomes a Backdrop. A buoyant soundtrack made from vinyl 45s played in the background (think: Eddie Hodges, X-Ray Spex, the roar of Niagara Falls, the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia). For the next twenty minutes, the crew disrobed, hoisting the garments onto a system of pulleys and supports installed throughout the room, or placing them on hangers alongside their masks and belts. Bodies clashed, tangled, and a controlled chaos ensued. Near the end of this anti-runway show, the stunned, silent crowd listened carefully to an audio recording of a caustic short text, written and read by Jennifer Krasinski, about a woman seeking answers and a snakelike sage. Then: a fit of applause.
The room, by now, was packed with the subjects O’Neill has been engaging for years—Americana, trauma, history—and those particular to this show: ephemerality, permeability, and mutability. Gracing the entrance, DIE MASTER SCRIM is a nine-foot-long hanging banner of Day-Glo yellow circles on black bandanas that evokes a set of dice. This marks the beginning of the game and is followed by more fantastic ensembles with titles that describe some of their silkscreen imagery—such as WITCHIPOO VESTMENT, a reference to the primary antagonist of the 1969 American television series H.R. Pufnstuf. Taking a cue from that program’s trippy, low-budget content, O’Neill’s unadorned papier-mâché Halloween masks loosely resemble a motley crew: Mork, Queen Grimhilde, Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, and US Marshal Matt Dillon (from Gunsmoke, 1952–61) are just a few.
At the back of the space, the scroll-like SERPENT LOOK transforms into a Scrim, which features a green fabric snake slithering over silkscreened images of the ancient board game Go, brought home one more leitmotif. The historic Indian version of snakes and ladders was a morality lesson: a player’s progression up the board is met with virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes). Carnival is similarly a lesson on morality (or a lack thereof), where norms are upended, if only temporarily, while revelry borders on the edge of violence. Like the Goya painting, O’Neill’s show underscores the destructive impulses lurking beneath carnivalesque celebrations, yet here, the destruction of the old clears the way for something new and collaborative. Cloaked in O’Neill’s genderless vestments, they stepped out of their social roles on opening night and into a strange new world. They carefully raised the STRAW MAN Vestment on a horizontal pole—and the artist placed a Marie Osmond mask over its face. These acts spoke to the mutability of O’Neill’s show, and to a sense of DIY, collective rebuilding.