Yesterday was the first scorching day of summer, and Eden Deering, the director of P·P·O·W gallery, was putting the final touches on a new group exhibition inspired by Lana Del Rey. “Every artist in the show is united in their devotion to Lana,” she said. “Everyone is a Lana fan and is inspired in their work.” The show is also about a lot of other things—art and artifice, sincerity and spectacle. “A lot of the work in the show and a lot of the artists deal with things that are fake,” she continued. “But they’re completely genuine about it.”
Installation view of “Hope is a dangerous thing” P·P·O·W, New York, June 6 – July 12, 2025. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of P·P·O·W, New York.
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing,” which opens today and runs through July 12, takes its title from the final track on Del Rey’s 2019 album Del Rey embodies the contradictions at the heart of the exhibition—emotional sincerity wrapped in spectacle, and something seemingly disposable that still somehow sticks with you. Del Rey looms large as both herself and an avatar: an imperfect pop star who is both underground and mainstream, glamorous and girl next door, entirely concocted yet deeply DIY.
“I was fantasizing about my ultimate girl group, like my ultimate artist Spice Girls,” Deering said. “I wanted everyone to feel like they were their own pop personas, but also be able to see this as an ensemble.” She added, “I wanted to keep it to millennials, to kind of deal with millennial nostalgia—anyone who was coming of age in the aesthetics and pop culture of 2000s, in that era of Tony Blair, pop music, and then also into the Obama era—this hope and what we thought about what the millennium would be.” The Del Rey references in the show range from the explicit to the oblique.
Robin F. Williams, g (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
“Obviously, Robin took it the most literally,” Deering said. While others engaged with pop and persona more abstractly, Robin F. Williams seemed to depict the singer mid-croon during that 2012 dud—a performance widely panned at the time and now seen as a turning point. The vivid painting, also embodies a figureless A.I. voice, and fittingly, glows in the dark.
The British artist Marianna Simnett also wields A.I., using it alongside her full arsenal of folklore, performance, and body horror in her video . She reframes the myth of Leda and Zeus by casting herself as both victim and aggressor through a hand-painted puppet. The five-minute film was shot and then entirely reprocessed using A.I., shifting through what Deering called “different vibe iterations.” As Deering put it, “She’s talking about power and control, but also the power dynamic between A.I. and the artist.”
Marianna Simnett, Leda Was a Swan, 2024. Video Still, Courtesy: Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin.
The show is rounded out by a diverse range of artists including Kyle Dunn and Kayode Ojo. Ojo’s standout shimmering sculpture—suspended from silver chains—resembles both a glamorous snowflake and a severe, ominous fractal. It is composed from chandeliers bought online. “It’s all stuff you can purchase on Amazon that are supposed to look like luxury,” Deering explained, “but it’s all basically plastic. It’s also about our relationship to fast fashion.”
Raque Ford, who had an installation at the Whitney last year, has three pieces in the show, including a large multi-section acrylic half circle, . Words and images have been carved out of the plastic sheets. “She found it all at the dump and then puts this kind of failed try at erotic fan fiction between Rihanna and Beyoncé on it,” Deering said. “The quote, ‘People think I look just like Beyoncé,’ comes from . It’s like clip art.”
Diane Severin Nguyen was across the room in an N95 mask finalizing which is a barrier emerging from the ground with a vivid image of what looks like a shattered space egg. Nguyen was spraying some sort of treatment atop it to give it a velvety kind of flocking. “I was trying to make it look a little bit frozen,” she said. “I don’t talk about my work like, ‘oh, it’s this or that.’ It’s just more like looking and maybe registering some familiarity and something non-familiar.”
Diane Severin Nguyen, (2024). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
In November, Nguyen will headline the Performa Biennial (the other two featured artists are Camille Henrot and Aria Dean). “We’re putting a band together and making a meta pop concert,” she said. Nguyen’s Del Rey connection runs deeper than pop. “I’m a Lana fan,” she said. “One of my goals is to be able to be indie and mainstream at the same time. Lana is the only artist, especially as a woman, who can do that.” She then relates this to her practice—some of Nguyen’s striking, otherworldly visuals are depictions of tiny sculptures she makes that could fit into her hand. “There’s something very minor, detailed, macro—you know, the smallest possible unit—and then something that’s much bigger, historical. It’s putting minor things together and wanting them to be understood on this more grandiose level.”
The artist Paul Kopkau was also attracted to Del Rey’s dichotomous role in the pop universe—sure, she’ll get the number one album, but you won’t hear her in every Uber you jump in. “We’re living in a contemporary time where there’s a lot of artifice surrounding us,” he said. “Lana does this kind of thing that a lot of pop stars don’t… There’s a detachment—she knows she’s dealing with this larger pop culture thing, but then is using that as a medium. And that feels very postmodern.” Kopkau wields simplicity with symbolic force, presenting a minimal yellow disk ( 2024) and a fragile shrine to consumer electronics (, 2025) made from Aqua-Resin, acrylic, and recycled butcher paper. The former evokes a synthetic sun; the latter, a makeshift media center assembled from the detritus of contemporary life.
Paul Kopkau, (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
The show can also be read as something of a self-portrait of Deering—but not only because she cast it from her inner circle. Her mother, Wendy Olsoff, is one of the P·P·O·W co-founders, and David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong were among its stable. That history echoes quietly in the show’s emotional core. “I spent so much of my life growing up in Provincetown with survivors of AIDS,” Deering said. “There’s a camp side and everything’s kind of funny in here—and it is funny—but there’s also the serious side of being at Tea Dance and everyone singing pop music together. That feels powerful. Hope is a dangerous thing, but we’re still doing it. That’s a really amazing thing about the human spirit.” She paused. “So there’s a really funny, campy, subconscious side of the show. And then another completely emotionally genuine belief in pop—and letting that be in a fine art space in a serious way.”
She added, “A perfect pop song like Lana can transform someone’s spirit in an instant. And the dream of art is to live up to that power that a pop song can have. The futility of that is obvious—as a static object—but I like the idea of reaching for it.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
