Wentrcek Zebulon
Reception
July 25, 2026
US BACK AT US
by Maya Lydia Bushell
Twins project their mythology across disparate cultures and their artifacts. As entities—or an entity, often precluded from individual identity by virtue of their uniform appearance—they have been deified and exiled; reviled, desired, and fundamentally misunderstood. Cast between fear and fantasy, they are commonly reduced to the feelings they engender in others rather than expanded to the full degree of their personhood(s)—shared and distinct.
In Kristen Wentrcek and Andrew Zebulon’s RECEPTION, the Twin decamps to a further field, offered as a condition of existence that traverses the boundaries of anatomy and institutional architecture and design. Within the garage space of Driveway, an occasional summer gallery in Rockaway Beach, the Twin is both room and occupant; an abstraction and an embodied, inhabitable, reality—reflections that face one another and find themselves joined in an infinite mirror.
A state of being.
A way of seeing.
Two doors. Two entrances. Two vinyl-coated foam sofas invite us to sit across from one another, our feet resting on the brown low-pile carpet. Originally designed as a daybed, a single seat, it has been cleaved in two—an embryo split postpartum rather than in utero—the sum of its character now found in its division. We suspend in this place, conceived, as the exhibition title suggests, to resemble a medical waiting room. Having exited one world we await our entrance into another, ready to be brought further into the theoretical building. In spirit, we flip through worn magazines, trying to distract ourselves with outdated gossip and diet trends, fighting the nature of these transitional spaces and the mild unease they induce. A lone potted plant, a mollifying decorative impulse, attempts to reassure us with its unlikely vitality—the liminal is survivable.
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Photos - Alec Kugler
To escape this middle we experience our own division: the Before Self, contoured by a lifetime of pains, pleasures, and boredoms, and the After Self, presumably physically the same but psychologically distinct. We do not know the set of experiences the After Body has lived for they have not yet come to pass. Our body is not our body but, rather, a likeness that we recognize as us and that others might mistake for us. We stand and catch sight of this double in the mirrored pendants that descend from the rafters, hung low to reflect the faces of those who move in and out of the room’s perimeter.
Us back at us.
Most reception areas, with their innocuous furnishings and muted palettes, imitate one another, interchangeable regardless of their particular scope of service. Fabricated in materials that are cost-effective, durable, and hygienic, they form the haptic foundation of our institutional associations: schools, hospitals, courts and prisons—ecosystems heightened by experience of their supposed fidelity to education, healthcare, and the law. Through the use of these materials, Wentrcek and Zebulon engage a specific register of our sense memory and deliver a facsimile of an environment that we accept as familiar but can’t
quite place.
Looking to the back wall our eyes settle on a row of etchings on green Corian® in coal-impregnated epoxy frames. Each depicts a famous set of twins, corporeal and otherwise. The identical torsos of the Grady Sisters from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) crowd the foreground to show off their Peter Pan collars and ribboned waists while the diagrammed livers of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874) elucidate the function of their singular organs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle, the twin gynecologists from David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), are eternally,
“Two Bodies. Two Minds. One Soul.”
Romulus and Remus suckle at the swollen teats of the she-wolf, thoughts of empire far from their infant minds within the dark walls of the Lupercal. Their world is milk and stone.
Wentrcek and Zebulon establish the Twin as a positive and a negative construction that generates meaning from both presence and absence. The 240,000 tons of rhyolite and sandstone displaced to create Double Negative (1969), Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork in Nevada, are an equivalence of air, bridging its trenches on opposing plateaus of Mormon Mesa, just as the elevations of the Twin Towers reflexively invoke the loss of their combined 220 stories, their spirit interred in the foundations where their bodies fell.
Two negatives make a positive.
The last etching is of the room itself—a mirror surface without a reflective coating. We see ourselves look in, one with the view.