For his 4th solo show, Francis Commeyne (b. 1988) produces a series of sculptures and mixed media assemblages of carved wood and found objects that express one's survival concerns, reflecting on the turns of his own life and the conditions of art-making in the general state of modern worry. In the years following a shift to domestic life since the global pandemic, Commeyne has shifted his focus from art-making and painting to carpentry (an ode to his Belgian roots) and household maintenance out of necessity, organizing and decluttering mundane items, performing daily chores of cooking and grocery shopping, repairing, and remaking the home. As a result, presenting an exclusively sculptural body of work reflects the artist's reflexive shift toward questioning things that matter.

Commeyne's principal subject, the modest hotdog, suggests a conceptual ambit. The hotdog as one of the basic mainstays of Filipino kitchens and street cuisine, has become a fun, festive, affordable, and quick snack or meal for people of all ages, genders, and social and economic level. The artist utilizes it in countless iterations and combinations as a satirical instrument, random, hilarious, ludicrous, and playfully sexual, to express observations, situations, sentiments, and the status of the world. Its accurate sculptural depiction serves as a lighthearted diversion from the current toxic environment in which we all find ourselves. The carved sausage is combined with familiar objects that offer the materials new and comic significations. Finally, the image of a pureed meat wrapped in an animal intestine, a macabre metaphor of one of the numerous appropriated features of globalized culture, paradoxically conveys an idiosyncratic gesture that speaks of the Philippine context, which is oftentimes described as a "melting pot" of cultures. We become what we consume.

Commeyne's artistic interpretations of everyday objects investigate the inextricable tension between quotidian life and situations in the art world. Comicality becomes the vocabulary that retaliates against society's ridiculousness and organized, commercialized pretension when dealing with change, burnout, and an apparent atypical direction of creative working. In a world that has gone mad, it does not take much effort to recognize how nonsensical our contemporary experience has become. The absurdity of human choice in a dystopian present is particularly concerning: politicians dictate how we live and die, corporations offer a "new normal" of an imagined "post-pandemic," and trolls tout ignorance as wonderful poetry.

Notwithstanding its nihilistic overtones, the exhibition portrays the complex resolution of an artist attempting to choose to rediscover the joy of making art. Ordinary things have come to help us cope with daily life and ultimately define ourselves, with the mundanity of the sausage serving as a reflection of our everyday decisions as well as existential issues in a world where we are but meat. This is the world we are creating together. This is the Dog Show.