SoiL Thornton’s “Metabolizing eviction try, work_mp3 and other games of topping”

Forget making it—how does an artist survive? SoiL Thornton’s exhibition at the Swiss Institute wants to show you the receipts. It’s meant to be an act of bravery for relatively established artists like Thornton to admit that they’re struggling. The works here incorporate the artist’s actual bank records and documents related to their recent eviction case. It’s a demonstration of precarity, resonant with Josh Kline’s essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” published earlier this year in October, that said the quiet part out loud: New York City is expensive.1 That discourse aside, Thornton’s show doesn’t raise the questions of big city affordability or the morality of rent so much as rephrase them in personal, poetic terms. 

Thornton’s answers are inadequate, both as artworks and as self-reflexive critiques of art. Occasionally, the show feels hapless. One work, I’m too tired to think anymore but I hope this provides reprieve (all 2026), consists of dried lavender flowers in “a quantity indexed to the curator’s weight.” It’s a nice gesture, if arbitrary, and could be read as using a fragrant, aromatherapeutic material to implicate institutional structures. Of course, that a curator made an exhibition happen is a pretty lightweight revelation. The piece also doesn’t specify that weight, which would be rude at any rate, yet the elision exacerbates the feeling that this gesture towards the profundity of a Félix González-Torres candy pile doesn’t have much of a point to make. There’s further evidence that the artist could have thought this work through a little better. Initially the flowers covered the gallery floor (as depicted in the installation images), but soon they were swept into translucent trash bags, piled around the room, with signs taped to them citing “unforeseen circumstances regarding sensitivities to dust and aroma” and the “health and safety” of museum staff. Spare a thought for whoever’s job it was to tidy up this self-care misfire, laboring in front of Thornton’s video realization suppression / Rihanna_work.mp3, a supercut of artists saying the word “work.”

Thornton takes models of institutional critique from Gonzalez-Torres, Tracey Emin, Dawn Kasper, Jade Kuriki-Olivo aka Puppies Puppies, and—especially—Cameron Rowland. A two-part piece titled some rest of rests displays Thornton’s disassembled bed frame, mattress, and linens in two sealed, inflatable tents. Where is the artist sleeping now? Not in the gallery, obviously, which leaves the punkness of the work somewhere south of Puppies Puppies living in public at the New Museum in 2023–24 or Kasper filling a nook of the 2012 Whitney Biennial with all her worldly goods. Thornton’s neatly arranged, earth tone bedding is austere, like a sepulchral ad for bohemia. Upstairs, the video diptych double pendulum scrolls through the artist’s bank account credits and debits from 2025, superimposed on footage of a colonoscopy machine demo. The endoscope travels through a rubbery, striated synthetic colon, free of feces or polyps, and while the data on the screens is raw, it, too, moves smoothly, allowing for only an ambient sort of accounting. In a few minutes of the forty-nine-minute piece, we see repeated transfers from savings, deposits from Simone Leigh’s studio, incidentals from Copenhagen and Amsterdam, and a 20,000-dollar wire from a Theresa Y Thornton, presumably a relative. These disclosures suggest an almost stereotypical profile of a contemporary artist on the international circuit, buoyed by gig work, the odd sale or appearance fee, and infusions of family money.

Which brings us to the show’s centerpiece, a remarkably obscure attempt at fiscal confession in the mode of Rowland: evict relief is a set of framed documents (plus a soiled, torn towel Thornton has owned since 2016) detailing the artist’s recent New York City eviction proceeding. The artist owed their landlord a staggering sum: a little over 47,000 dollars. Thornton went to court, paid 25,000 dollars up front, then proposed that Swiss Institute put up 22,296 dollars for the completion of an artwork consisting of covering their back rent. In the event, as framed emails explain, the institution could not offer more than their standard 9,544-dollar honorarium and the remaining 5,700 dollars from the 10,000-dollar production budget. The artist writes in a framed declaration that “there was no additional support able to be found via donors, trustees or the like.” Yet Thornton paid off the back rent anyhow—when they pulled the cord, their parachute opened—and the eviction was canceled in March.

Thornton’s show is part of a trend in redistributive art, in which artists use the levers of institutional critique to redirect funds from museums and patrons. For example, fields harrington’s Unfree Free Time (Bike Rental) for the current Greater New York biennial pays a delivery driver an hourly wage to chain their e-bike up in the PS1 lobby. To that end, evict relief presents many raw facts, and describes a harrowing ordeal of housing insecurity that no one should face. At the same time, it leaves big things unsaid, such as what level of apartment we’re talking about, or how the artist wound up so deeply indebted to their landlord in the first place—was it a principled stance, a rent strike? Sheer absentmindedness? Necessity?—and how they quickly found 25,000 dollars. Thornton writes that art claiming a position of “radical honesty” that “poses as honest and true or hyper exposing, is indeed all of those things. The reality is that only the artist and those who know the artist personally would be able to confirm or deny such facts.” In a way, it’s none of our business. To demand a total financial autopsy would be to redouble the invasions of capitalism, and Thornton is right to refuse. Yet when the artist is so forthright about some details but coy about others, the ultimate statement reads less systemic polemic, more personal gambit—less “property is theft,” more “give me cash.” Still, this is preferable to a pat, sanctimonious, and successful version: a sign on the wall declaring the institution paid off the artist’s debt, read while inhaling a harsh carpet of herbs. This show’s most interesting, revealing, and honest moments are its failures. In this, it underscores that concrete solutions to precarity will need a different venue than contemporary art.