Pusher
Can you Can-Can?
Danielle Neu
October 31 - November 14, 2026
Artem Nanushyan
Merlin James & Édouard Vuillard
Techno-Libertarian Realism
Long Time Coming
Emergency Group Show
Serial
Ghost Finishing School
Her Selected Works with Carlotte S.
Lawless Romantic Underworld
Cavity
Rhythmanalysis
Danaë
Three Miles
Nights at the Circus
Rain Barrel
Danielle Neu
Oct 31 - Nov 14, 2026
The waitress floated past in a long black polyester dress, its hem just an inch off the ground. Her breasts bright like headlights were held up by nylon cups sewn into her dress, and she looked otherworldly, bathed in the soft pink light of the lounge: an angel from the isle of Vegas.
The lounge at the Peppermill was a rectangular room but it felt round because every corner was smoothed and eased, upholstered in Naugahyde or plush velvet. The mirrors covered every vertical surface and the ceiling too. The ceiling was made up of tiny mirrored mosaic tiles that reminded me of bioluminescent fish scales. The tiny squares of glass performed a dance of reflections every time you tilted your head and looked up: I looked up and noticed an aura of myself, one I did not recognize.
Beyond the infinite mirror there was hard plastic creme tubing that zigzagged across the ceiling like a cobra painted by the Egyptians, all hard angles; the way it slithered its way across the reflective surface and refracted onto every adjoining plane cut through some kind of space-time continuum. The tubing had tiny lights alongside it that brought a flickering pulse and a low electric hum to the place. A lifelike cherry blossom tree hung from the ceiling, all silk petals and branches of plastic.
A gaggle of waitresses were in one corner of the room chatting and holding their serving trays like shields of armor across their chests, it was a troupe I’d like to join. The owner of the place must have imposed a rule on their makeup because every waitress had applied thick, white greasepaint to her face. These women looked like china dolls: lips painted black, faces of porcelain, hair pulled back tight into cotton bonnets. In the room that was mirror upon mirror the waitresses doubled, tripled, and quadrupled upon themselves in their own reflections. Each one their own Rockette group, arms and legs perfectly in sync with one another: can you do the can-can into infinity?
Sitting in my booth alone, I thought about a photograph of Marilyn Monroe a friend had shown me: we see the back of her head of cherubic curls, hands held high and fingers spread wide, she’s looking straight into a fun-house mirror and her reflection is elongated and warped twice her size with eyebrows and cheekbones so high she almost looks like a puddle of Greta Garbo. That image is seared in my heart because Marilyn finally broke character and let some sort of spirit out, but I think we could have seen it before in her heavy lidded eyes if we’d looked hard enough.
I noticed silk flowers growing out of the top of the velvet booth I was ensconced in and realized I was lonely. I was here in town for a particular reason but sometimes you find yourself alone in a hotel room feeling like a fish out of water, fixated on the carpeted bathroom and oddly textured curtains, wishing your room wasn’t all the way up on the 13th floor. I had a hard time sleeping last night. I equate silence to loneliness. I had only the pills and the cable television to keep me company in that lonesome hotel room.
The waitress came back to my booth and kneeled down to make eye contact with me. “Would you like anything else hun?” I looked down at the menu and said, “the Western fruit plate.”
The televisions in the lounge of the Peppermill put me with a different sort of company. I counted 28 screens in total, all playing old-time music video hits in unison. Watching all the heads singing on the screens I envisioned I was a fly resting on the petal of a silk flower, seeing in honeycomb vision for the very first time.
Danielle Neu