“Leather and Plastic”

The town of Prattsville, New York, is, like many places in the United States, an industrial afterthought. It was established in 1824 to accommodate a tannery built by its namesake, Zadock Pratt, who dammed the Schoharie Creek for his mill pond, stripped the abundant hemlock trees of bark for tannins, and sent the finished leather goods south to New York City by horse-drawn teams. The workforce grew with the operation, so the tannery needed a town for the 2,000 people who either worked for Pratt or supported the people who did.

After founding a town and growing rich from an industrial operation that altered the course of a waterway and nearly eliminated an entire species of tree from the area, Pratt decided that a more direct and purely aesthetic intervention in the landscape was fitting. He paid someone to carve the story of his life into a rockface. Pratt Rock, as it is called, has retained its original minimalist pictorial narrative: a hemlock tree, a horse, some birth and death dates, Zadock’s face in profile as well as that of his son George, a casualty of the American Civil War. The awkward relief sculpture is in the National Historic Registry. You can hike to it on a well-maintained trail.

“Leather and Plastic,” a show that combines contemporary sculpture, painting, and sound with artifacts from the Zadock Pratt Museum, takes on both the industrial history of Prattsville and the subject of the historical record itself. The title’s simple juxtaposition of materials ubiquitous to the daily life of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, underscores a vast difference in the material specificity of these worlds, while the objects on display (and the way they are displayed) indicate a structural continuity over time that is just as real as a leather bridle or a plastic bottle.

Em Rooney’s Twin Portrait (2025) is the most literal approach to the show’s historiographic proposition. A tangled pile of high-quality leather bridles sits on the floor next to a similarly tangled mound of translucent green cast-offs from plastic beer tap handles. Bridles were needed to transform animal strength and movement into transportation and motive power for agriculture and other commercial uses. Nothing in 1830 worked—including the leather goods industry itself—without this animal control. The plastic scraps, by contrast, are useless in themselves, and civilization would not grind to a halt without decorative pulls for beer taps, but it is the gratuity of the product and the negativity of this refuse that illustrate the importance of plastic. Just about anything could have been surrounded by these strips, and the abstraction of this waste product suggests a significant shift in our perception of manufacturing from something describable and traceable to something both universal and unintelligible. And, it must also be admitted, quite beautiful for reasons as unclear as the plastic’s material origins. Twin Portrait is not just a study in difference. As the title indicates, the items are related, if not identical, and the fact that the plastic refuse looks like an imitation of the leather harness can be read as a statement of continuity. They are both, despite their distance in time, a product of the same enduring economic structure and social relations.

This dialectic of difference and continuity unfolds across the show. Tony Bluestone’s Reality Plays Itself (2025) considers the frequently perverse aesthetics of manufacturing and manufactured objects so often designed to resemble the obsolete material or process that the object is replacing. This isn’t a new phenomenon reflecting a late-capitalist nostalgia for a more understandable object-world. Small daguerreotype cases made from vulcanized rubber meant to look like tooled leather compose one of the displays constructed from the museum’s collection. Linnéa Gad’s Flapper (2025) reminds us that manufacturing means “made by hand.” The warped, yellow, ceramic sheet was produced with layers of slip—something the curator’s notes analogize to the way that bark grows. In the piece’s insistently superficial nature, we are reminded also of the two interdependent surface layers at play in the tanning process—bark and animal skin. That they both serve a protective function for the living organism they are removed from is recalled by the violence of the steel armature that pierces the ceramic component that it also supports. Flapper, along with Reality Plays Itself, invokes nature as an input into the manufacturing process and reminds us of the exemplary (and quietly violent) ending of Pratt’s industrial adventure: resource exhaustion. In the space of thirty years, the area’s abundant hemlock was entirely depleted by the tannery.

Even if animal hides and hydropower are more intuitively grasped than the many processes that go into something like plastic, the political economic conditions necessary for the founding and operation of Pratt’s tannery were anything but straightforward. Capitalism was already a global affair in the early nineteenth century, and the animal hides that were shipped from New York City came from as far away as Argentina. Even if we consider only South American cattle ranching and the domestic meatpacking industry, this now alien and sentimentalized simplicity quickly reveals itself as a fantasy. The ability to move raw materials and finished goods to and from the factory and market clearly links our moment to Pratt’s. One of the primary differences, the acceleration of production and consumption, can be attributed almost entirely to the literal acceleration of shipping. Zadock Pratt’s carriage is, suitably, the largest object in the show. Everything, in a way, functions as a satellite of this form of personal and commercial transportation, which has been adorned with a massive plexiglass “tribal tattoo” (Hugo Montoya’s Rolling in The Grave, 2025), the flattened and commercialized remnant of a society that, for a time, offered an alternative to industrial capitalism. This reminder of one of the many forms of violence that transportation facilitates is appropriately flanked by the whips used to drive the horses that powered it.

The movement of goods and people is implicit in each of the works on display, but its outsized importance is represented by two pieces that literally permeate the space. Pohan has installed an industrial scenting system that fills the room with “new car scent,” volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that register as the smell of leather when you enter the room. Complementing this familiar olfactory experience is a voice recording of someone trying and failing to imitate the sounds of a Tesla. The point is simple enough: the aesthetic and commercial world that we inhabit is absurd. Which is not to say that it is benign. This absurdity constitutes the very real conditions for our material and social lives.

One way to read the exhibit is to see it as an exploration of what Jason Moore has called the “four cheaps”: the cheap nature, cheap labor, cheap food, and cheap energy that capitalism requires to produce a profit. The presence of so much plastic, the inexpensive piece of store-bought wood, and the displays of historic objects that were used in the manufacturing process indicate both the evolution of production processes and the sameness of the forces of production that ultimately shape them.

The daily reality of all of this cheap stuff is taken up almost aggressively by Catherine Telford Keogh, whose two sculptures (Low-Life [Mint Condition] and Low-Life [Rose Rut], both 2022) enclose the manufactured and preserved foods that make up so much of a contemporary diet in layers of plant-based resin (the trees never leave our sight) under plexiglass and surrounded by marble evoking kitchen counters. The utility of these foods that can last for long periods of time and therefore travel long distances has been negated here by the artist’s exaggeration of this primary feature. This transformation of a certain useful longevity into an aestheticized permanence evokes a relational temporality that is often minimized by the discourse (and reality) that quickly manufactured, disposable goods demand. Not only does the cheap food that makes extractive and exploitative economies appear sustainable have epochal environmental consequences, but the petroleum that wraps and transports these goods is ancient—the product of a fossil record evoked here by the accretion of goods under glass. 

Art shows critical of capitalism are a dime a dozen, and high-minded, revisionist histories are even more common. These shows are so abundant, they leave one rather depressed about the critical capacity of visual art or, indeed, the difference between one statement and another or one object and another. “Leather and Plastic” accomplishes several things that set it apart from the morality plays that we have come to expect from art shows with political or historical content, because it is an inquiry rather than an evaluation. In its curiosity about the conditions of production that prevailed in this tiny corner of the United States for about thirty years, the show offers a chance to see historically contingent relationships, consider the particular qualities of different industries, and think not just about the difference between the past and the present, but about historical and economic processes over time. This allows the curator, Tony Bluestone, and the work in the show to actually say something about capitalism—about its schizophrenic temporality, its aesthetic repetition compulsion, and its continued dependence on nature and labor. But most importantly, what it captures is the fact that capitalism is not a thing but a dynamic social relation. It is not defined by the presence or absence of certain things, of violence, or environmental degradation, but relations of production that allow the owners of the means of production to extract a profit from the labor of those who own nothing.

Incredibly, the show makes this point without showcasing the labor exploitation that most effectively signifies the evils of capitalism. This, importantly, deprives the audience of an opportunity for pity and moral indignation, which is so often mistaken for political analysis. The labor that is on display is largely that of the contemporary artists, and it therefore verges on utopian in the best way. Tucked into this rich and nuanced history of accelerating but ultimately unchanging capitalist social relations, is a glimpse of a world in which people might produce something other than use values and trash from something other than animal death and ecological destruction: working conditions that allowed for imagination; social arrangements that are more than the afterthought of a factory owner; and, eventually, a history that consists of more than a man and the resources he set out to exploit.