Lava lamps, coiled hot plates, low-fat yoghurt, zebra print: Elizabeth Wiet reflects on Whitney Claflin’s I was wearing this when you met me, an exhibition that conjures the thrift-store glamour and post-recession grit of millennial coming-of-age.
Like the beat of a Pulp song playing in a suburban disco, an ambiguous nostalgia pulses through Whitney Claflin’s show, I was wearing this when you met me. But this is not the “I was a nineties kid” nostalgia meme-ified on Instagram. It is sexier, grittier, more adult. A lava lamp placed on a low plinth (Untitled, 2025) recalls the decor with which we furnished our pre-teen bedrooms, dreaming of the apartments we would inhabit in our twenties, while the title of the exhibition is drawn from a perfume ad featuring Kate Moss, idol to many a girl who wanted to be more of a grown up than she was.
I was wearing this when you met me is quietly outfitted with pop culture icons that millennials appropriated in order to feel adult when we were just kids. But the overall aesthetic shape is less Y2K, more indie sleaze. Even more than adolescence, it communes with the moment when we were wayward and down-on-our-luck in New York in the late 2000s. The adulthood we came into was not the one we expected; a worldwide recession still reverberated, yet certain objects in the exhibition gesture toward the scrappiness that allowed us to get by. A coiled hot plate, symbol of an under-equipped kitchen, vaguely resembles a DJ controller (Remix, 2025). Pleasure proliferated—via live music, via a second sexual revolution brought on by the HPV vaccine and the IUD.
Claflin’s exhibition is installed across four rooms on MoMA PS1’s second floor. The outer two rooms are anchored by a selection of horizontal paintings, hung across the walls like film strips. Rather than canvas, most use stretched found fabric or women’s garments as their substrates. The fabrics are loud, often a bit déclassé: wine-stained zebra print (Yogurt the Color of Night, 2012) and glitter (All signal, no noise (!!!), 2020) suggest a night out. They announce themselves from a mile away, but they also whisper to us in tiny newsprint, requiring careful looking. Text excised from magazines, more than anything else in the show, situates it in a particular time and place. “Fake names in their phones,” “We’re craving the nondigital even more,” and “recently employed” all channel the zeitgeist of the early Obama years.
And yet, for a show ostensibly about time, I was wearing this when you met me does not unfold chronologically. Instead, works are arranged in an associative rhythm reminiscent of a mixtape. Music provides the spine, albeit in an unexpected way. None of the late 2000s New York bands canonised in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom appear here. Rather, Britpop band Pulp serves as Claflin’s lyrical lodestar. A looping video of Jarvis Cocker dancing, only six or seven seconds long in its original iteration, is displayed in the first gallery. Its title, Chelsea (2021–2025), evokes neighbourhoods in London and New York that our ilk flicker in and out of, but never occupy. Per the wall label, Cocker “becomes the goo in the lava lamp.” That goo is viscous, erotic, but also ephemeral. Its bubbles are like snowflakes: bound to happen only once.
The bubbles in a lava lamp, like Cocker’s looped dancing, appear to go on forever. But another gloopy substance in the exhibition is prone to spoilage. Hung adjacent to the lava lamp and hot plate is Untitled (2022), a graphite drawing of a container for low-fat Yoplait yoghurt. It feels like a relic from nineties diet culture, or simply from the moment before we all went Greek. Putrid hues and motifs of decay proliferate throughout the show. Torn Ric Rac dangles from the canvas in Lo (2018–2019), while the glowing screen in Cinema (2023) appears defaced by ink drips and swipes of silver graffiti. Claflin is clearly a student of Mark Fisher’s theory of “lost futures.” She is also an academically trained painter of the first degree. Nods to Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, and Germany’s Capitalist Realism movement deepen her nostalgia’s critical bite. In Ten Nineteen (2019), the visual pun of an Academy Records price tag takes a sly stab at the contrivances of both the art market and the vinyl resale market. So much for the sentimentality many of us feel for crackling LPs.
My use of the first-person plural is somewhat of a misnomer. Though I consumed the culture contained in Claflin’s show, I was never part of its scene—I spent indie sleaze’s golden years on the campus of a small college in rural New Hampshire. I dreamed of finding myself at the Bushwick parties documented nightly by the Cobrasnake, chatted up by some cute boy in a Smiths t-shirt. But my reality was much different. At best, I could hope to spend Friday evenings pressed up against the wall of a dirty fraternity basement with a hockey player who would go on to sell crypto. Yet Claflin herself is acutely attuned to the disjunctions between fantasy and reality. A painting on primed polyester, Southeast of Boston (2023), references the geography of her adolescence. Vivid swathes of colour emerge from a central axis on a solid white background. By contrast, paintings that evoke the urban spaces of New York, such as 6 Delancey (2010–2020), are messy, murky, more degraded.
It would be easy to read Southeast of Boston and 6 Delancey as representations of innocence and experience. One anticipates the life ahead, while the other reflects the life actually led. But Southeast of Boston might not be as pure as it looks. Remember Claflin’s substrate: polyester primed with so many layers of gesso that the fabric becomes unrecognisable. Only the artist knows what lies underneath. For all of the show’s hidden easter eggs (see: Cat Marnell), it also possesses a diaristic inscrutability—one akin to walking around the city with a song stuck in your head that no one else can hear.
Word by Elizabeth Wiet
