Gallery Hours
1:00p - 7:00pm Monday-Wednesday
Saturday-Sunday 12-6pm
137 Montrose Avenue, Brooklyn
The Dog House Gallery, a collaboration between Lisa Levy Industries and the Brooklyn Comedy Collective, brings funny artists to the comedy world.
It is an enclosed exhibition space in the lobby of BCC’s Dog House studios. The wall-mounted display case is an enclosed, fully functional gallery complete with track lighting and an oak floor. The gallery’s programming features artists who use humor as an integral part of their artistic practices. By bringing art into a comedic space, Doghouse Gallery fosters a dialogue between the world of comedy and the art world, bridging the gap between the two disciplines and inspiring artists and performers alike.
Gallery Director: Lisa Levy
Associate Gallery Director: Roman Kalinovski
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Dog House Gallery is pleased to present I’m (trying) my best, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Tawanda Gona, opening January 3, 2025. Drawing inspiration from memes and comic strips, Gona’s work merges the solipsism of internet culture with the candid self-deprecation of stand-up comedy. Thought-bubbles tell us every minor concern that crosses the minds of Gona’s subjects. Many raise Larry David-level petty complaints, prompting viewers to wonder: is it really that big of a deal? Others pose more serious critiques of advertisements that over-promise and social media’s failure to create meaningful connections. Tongue-and-cheek jokes are often thinly veiled invocations of sociological and existential questions. As do many of the best comedians, Gona uses the comfort of laughs to inch viewers closer to hard truths. Tawanda Gona is a comedian, artist and writer based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn. His work has been featured in the Boston Globe, two seasons of Desus and Mero on Showtime, social media and clubs across the country. This is his second solo art exhibition. His first was at the Brick Auxiliary Gallery.
PRIOR EXHIBITIONs
Dog House Gallery is pleased to present Donut Dog, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Nancy Elsamanoudi.
Elsamanoudi’s whimsical and humorous body of work draws inspiration from funny pet videos from TikTok, adorable celebrity animals like Pesto the king penguin chick and Moo Deng the baby pygmy hippo, and her beloved poodle Fergus. Her colorful paintings investigate the complex relationships between animals and humans, from sunglasses-wearing dogs eating “people food” and orange cats causing chaos to animals from social media that seem too cute to be real. Elsamanoudi’s work examines the bonds we share with the animal kingdom, whether the closeness we feel from our animal companions or the parasocial relationships we develop with impossibly adorable creatures on TikTok.
ABOUT NANCY ELSAMANOUDI
Nancy Elsamanoudi is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. She earned her MFA from Pratt Institute and her BA from Miami University. Elsamanoudi has had solo exhibitions at SFA Projects and Amos Eno Gallery, as well as a two-person exhibition at SPRING/BREAK Los Angeles. She has also exhibited at Readymade Gallery, Space 776, Equity Gallery, The Painting Center, Pelham Art Center, and other venues in New York and beyond. She participated in the DNA Residency in Orleans, MA, in 2023 and 2024. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Bomb Magazine, Lohud, Artcritical, Art Spiel, and other publications.
DAVE ZACKIN: 10,000 BAD IDEAS
ABOUT DAVE ZACKIN
Dave Zackin is a designer and a fine artist working in New York City. Zackin earned a bachelor’s degree in animation at the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Public Health at the Hunter/CUNY School of Public Health, and a Master in Urban Studies at Queens College. His short animated film, Tunanooda, was screened in more than eighty film festivals, including New Directors, New Films at Lincoln Center, and the Kodak New Filmmakers' Showcase at Cannes, and won top prizes at the Student Emmys and the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Zackin's work has been featured in Chronicle Books' The Where, They Why, and The How, and in Time Out New York Magazine. He is the designer of the now ubiquitous City of New York Public Space Recycling Bins, recycling how-to stickers and hundreds of posters, public health info-sheets, and other things for the City of New York.
Michael Buckland: Retrospective
May-July 2024
A mirror, a clock, a poster, an egg, presidents, pencils, a signed baseball is a partial list of ingredients for the exhibition Retrospective. This motley selection of things attempts to produce a quotidian variety show of ideas and objects. Humor occasionally comes to the surface.
Michael Buckland lives and sometimes works in Brooklyn NY. He often claims to have been born in Canada but this has never been confirmed. His work wallows in the vernacular and the quotidian and has been described by one critic as aphoristic. He has exhibited in North America, Europe, and Asia.. He has currently revived an old project of trying to halt the earth’s rotation so he can get off. He likes using rubber stamps and taking long walks on the beach.
Shampoooty: Kids Toys, Adult Issues
March 22 to May 10, 2024
Kids Toys, Adult Issues, an exhibition by emerging Brooklyn-based artist inventor, fabricator, and interactive technology engineer Andy Sahlstrom, known as Shampoooty on social media (132k followers). This exhibition marks a cozy NYC solo show for Shampoooty after a series of successful exhibitions across the country. Kids Toys, Adult Issues remixes childhood innocence with the complexities and darker aspects of adulthood through an impressive collection of 3D models and physical sculptures. This body of work challenges viewers to reconsider their perceptions of play and seriousness, blending humor with thought-provoking commentary on contemporary life.
David Kramer: Running Joke
Four Self-Deprecating Paintings Over Four Nights
January 19 to March 1, 2024
Act 1: Small Potatoes, Act 2: One of My Many Fans, Act 3: A Couple of My Biggest Fans, Act 4: Lousy Photorealist
David Kramer hangs a painting of a sack of small white potatoes in a glass case behind a bar in the lobby of a comedy club in Brooklyn on a cold January night. Guests arrive. Drinks are served. This act repeats itself over three more nights over the course of this exhibition, slowly revealing a body of new work. And, perhaps, simultaneously revealing the punchline to a long-winded joke.
What goes on behind the scenes is that Kramer is slowly, cautiously, self-consciously revealing that this new body of work also signals an epic change of direction. But like most punchlines and the best humor, this is layered with an honest assessment of the situation at hand. Kramer has begun to peel away the text from his work (which has been a staple of his painting for years) only to admit that his epic changes are perhaps just small potatoes in the grand scheme of things in the long arc of art history and a long history of paintings that never came with text on them before in the first place.
At the opening reception, BCC Artistic Director Phillip Markle, in character as a comedic “art expert,” will discuss David’s painting with the exhibition’s curator, Lisa Levy.
DAVID KRAMER was born in NYC in 1963 where he continues to live and work. His paintings, sculptures, videos, performances, and installations have been exhibited widely throughout Europe and North America.
His work is in many private and public collections including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Bunker Artspace (West Palm Beach, Florida), and The Museum of London, Ontario.
Babak Ganjei: Greatest Hits B-Sides and Rarities Vol. 1
November 16 to December 31, 2023
Greatest Hits B-Sides and Rarities Vol. 1 features new versions of the text drawings that made Ganjei Instagram-famous. His Film Ideas series started on Twitter, with each entry’s cutting brevity stemming from the platform’s 140-character limit per tweet. Other works are more diaristic and confessional, making personal moments and insecurities public in a relatable way. Ganjei has scaled his greatest hits down for his New York debut, miniaturizing them to fit in the Dog House Gallery display case. Their size has been reduced, but their comedic value has not, with the drawings combining Ganjei’s dry, self-deprecating sense of humor with a DIY aesthetic.
BABAK GANJEI is a London-based visual artist, poet, musician, comic book writer, and radio host. He captured the minds of the world when his irreverent Film Idea series went viral, with such titles as Chicken Nugget City, Kung-Fu Jesus, and Jurassic Shop. Inspired by the comedy and music of the 1990s, Ganjei is prolific in his output, creating wildly unpredictable and laugh-out-loud funny art. Speaking of his work, Ganjei states: “The work doesn’t take itself seriously, but I take nonsense very seriously.” Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College, Ganjei has written multiple comics, turned books by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Jeremy Clarkson into works of blackout poetry, and tried to sell a painting of his credit card back to Barclays to pay off his debt. Instagram: @babakganjei
Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw: Meat Sweats
October 4 to November 13, 2023
Meat Sweats is an excessive display of raw, decadent meat: a feast for the eyes. The ceramic meats mimic a common display found in butcher shops but inhabit a display case inside a comedy club instead. Throughout the duration of the show the meats —chicken, sausage, hamburger, and more — appear to be continuously sweating, as if being overheated to death. The result is grotesque and humorous, with an absurd nod to its unique location.
JEN CATRON AND PAUL OUTLAW cmet and began collaborating at Cranbrook Academy of Art. After graduating, they moved their art practice to Brooklyn, New York, where they live and collaborate today. Using performance, painting, video, and mechanics, the artists create layered conceptual pieces that oscillate between the tragic and the absurd, using humor and enjoyable participatory experiences to take viewers through a range of emotions. Their absurd, provocative, and weirdly funny artworks have been widely exhibited and written about in places such as The Brooklyn Museum and the New York Times.