"ON THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 2, the crowd upstairs at Meredith Rosen's new Penn Station-adjacent gallery was filling up against a backdrop of Catharine Czudej's black-and-white paintings featuring defaced QR codes. Her husband, art appraiser Tobias Czudej, offered generous pours of tequila for friends at the entrance. Most people didn't realize that this was only half the show.Six flights down, Catharine Czudej was quietly pulling off one of the more disorienting and high-production-value presentations during the first round of openings kicking off the fall exhibition season"
"On-screen, I saw a third-person player-tracking shot of a naked man (artist and actor Thomas McDonell) sprinting barefoot down an empty country road. The work began with a voice-over of a father and son gaming against each other. McDonell jumps and "murks" (a gamer term for kills) an elderly cyclist (presumably the father), slips into the dad's clothes, and dances manically to a British bassline house trackas a frenzied live-comment feed scrolls away. "Smash that subscribe button!" a giddy off-screen streamer says."
Catharine Czudej presented a two-part exhibition at a Penn Station–adjacent gallery with upstairs paintings of defaced QR codes and a basement multimedia installation. The basement work, Don't Stop Moving (2025), occupied a former garment-factory garage and ran across several monitors near tightly parked hot dog and halal carts. The video features Thomas McDonell sprinting barefoot, a father-and-son gaming voice-over, a simulated killing of an elderly cyclist, costume swapping, and manic dancing to a British bassline house track while a live-comment feed and streamers respond. The opening mixed high production spectacle with questions about staging and audience participation.
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