There’s a moment at dusk that doesn’t declare itself. A hush in the day’s breath, when the outlines of the world begin to loosen, when what once felt firm feels strangely soft. GENERAL CONDITIONS, on view at Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School through November 29th, lingers in that fragile in-between. Not in collapse, but in the imperceptible sag of the structures we assumed would stand the test of time.

Gathering work from a wide range of contemporary artists, the exhibition contemplates bureaucracy, architecture, legal frameworks—systems intended to contain, define, and direct  public life. But the show is also about where these systems falter: the hairline fractures, the fogged glass, the language that 

strays further from reach. Power is ever present, but not always visible. It moves like the weather—ambient, shaping everything.
Rather than presenting a single narrative,  GENERAL CONDITIONS permeates across registers—sculpture, photography, textile, installation—with each piece considering how people move within conditions that they did not choose. It lingers on the ambiguity of systems: navigating these thrust conditions, how policy quietly mutates, and how language evolves into unintelligible evasiveness. Each work contributes to a mood that is less of a declaration than it is an echo—less fire than slow-burning ember.
There lies a strange beauty in this in-betweenness. Not romantic, but reflective. As if the world is being rewritten in lowercase, sentence by uncertain sentence. In that uncertainty, something tender emerges: not clarity, but attention. Not answers, but endurance.

Still, general conditions is not an elegy. The instability on view at the school is also a site of promise—a space where new strategies emerge, languages form, and new forms of attention rise, all of which are shaped by refusal and imagination. Amid the abstraction lies a quiet insistence on presence. On care. On the importance of noticing what is around us, even when it has yet to be named.
What hangs in the air is not despair, but tendrils of a reckoning. A recognition that we just might be in that dimming part of the day. A waning hour, when things are still visible, but only just. 

Where the past has not entirely let go, and the future has not fully yet arrived. GENERAL CONDITIONS doesn’t ask viewers to solve or escape this suspended moment. There is seemingly not one single answer to understand our present. Rather, the exhibition simply invites them to inhabit it—to interpret its varying textures, its silences, its signals. To see, in the gathering dusk, the outlines of something not fully yet known.