The Off-Season Commissary

Exhibition. 6 works on view at ///farms.jars.nerve, 2729 REED ST, Grays Ferry. The wall is circular: walking in either direction returns to the title wall. Use Tab to move between works and Enter to read a work’s wall label. Arrow keys move along the wall.

Six works at a single point in the city, the first acquired in February 2025 and the most recent in July 2025; all of them have since been accessioned into the permanent collection. One commissioner: Police Department. The museum did not solicit any of them.

The works are exhibited in order of acquisition. Visitors will notice that the subject does not change; the museum invites them to consider what does.

1. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 1 — Recreational vehicle, applied decal, oxidising steel tables, overcast exposure. Accession 17450616. Acquired February 28, 2025. 566 days on view. The work is organised by a single red stripe that runs the length of the white coachwork and breaks where the service door interrupts it, leaving the painted band to resume on the cab beyond. A large team decal occupies the centre panel in green and black, its saturation markedly higher than the sun-dulled surface it sits on, while rusted folding tables assemble themselves in the foreground as though awaiting a service that is not underway. Overcast light flattens the body and denies the chrome any highlight. As the first work in the series, it establishes the vantage — oblique, from the traffic side — against which the museum reads the arrangements that follow.
2. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 2 — Recreational vehicle, applied decal, oxidising steelwork, overcast light. Accession 17463957. Acquired March 7, 2025. 559 days on view. The composition is organised by the red stripe, which runs unbroken across the body and is interrupted only by the seam of the side door and the sag of the wheel well beneath. Above it the white panels have taken on a grey cast from weather and road film, while the applied team decal remains saturated and unfaded, the brightest passage in an otherwise overcast frame. In the foreground a rusted shelving rack and a spattered wooden table have accumulated in front of the work, arranged as though for service. The museum preserves this piece for the contrast between the durability of its ornament and the settling of everything it is attached to.
3. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 5 — Commercial coach, painted steel, rooftop climate unit, weathered timber. Accession 17634710. Acquired June 3, 2025. 471 days on view. The composition is organised by the red stripe, which runs the full length of the white body and breaks only where the service door has been left standing open, admitting a flat rectangle of shadow. In front of it a wooden bench and an empty steel shelving rack have been arranged parallel to the coach, their surfaces greyed and pitted, so that the work reads as an interior turned outward and left that way. Read against its siblings in the series, this is the panel view in which the vehicle's dormancy is most fully furnished, and the museum preserves it on that basis.
4. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 6 — Recreational vehicle, aerosol enamel, timber staging, oxidising steel. Accession 17717989. Acquired June 14, 2025. 460 days on view. The lower red band has been overpainted in a brighter, unblended red that stops short of the original edge, leaving two reds in conversation across the white flank. Leaning steel shelving uprights and a row of sawhorses have been staged beneath the body, so that the vehicle reads less as a thing at rest than as one wall of an open workroom. Read against the earlier views in this series, the timber below has been restacked while the graffiti tag above it remains untouched. The museum preserves the work for this division of labour between its upper and lower registers.
5. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 7 — Automotive, stationary, oxidising. Accession 17807350. Acquired June 20, 2025. 454 days on view. The work's dark navy body is the only wet-looking surface in an otherwise chalked and desaturated composition, and it returns the midday light in narrow bands along the hood, roof rail and door glass. Two striped cones stand in the near foreground, unattached to any work in progress, and they read as staging placed around the piece rather than beside it. Against the earlier works in this series, the museum notes the SUV's tighter position to the curb and the fresh brightness of its front wheel face. The series is held together less by the vehicles than by the corner's habit of receiving them.
6. The Off-Season Commissary, No. 8 — Box truck, matte black, roof fairing, guardrail enclosure. Accession 17871660. Acquired July 3, 2025. 441 days on view. White paint applied directly to the driver-side glass reads as gesture rather than notation, its loops catching more light than any other surface on the truck's matte black body. The rounded roof fairing, once aerodynamic, now functions chiefly as the composition's dominant mass, pressing upward toward the awning behind it. The museum notes that the guardrail across the foreground encloses the work more securely than any fence, and that the silver vehicle intruding from the right places the truck in company rather than isolation. Among the works gathered here, this one is the most heavily inscribed.

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