Marc Kokopeli (b. 1987, Seattle, WA; lives and works in New York) is a contemporary artist known for sculpture, installation, mixed media, and media works that explore childhood identity formation, infantilization, millennial media culture/nostalgia, and the stubborn materiality of digital and consumer technologies.
He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has shown with galleries including Reena Spaulings Fine Art (New York), Édouard Montassut (Paris), Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin), and Gladstone. His practice has included transforming popular crafts like “diaper cakes” (Pampertaarten) into vehicle- or excavator-like sculptures made from diapers and found objects (e.g., the 2022 show Die Pampertaarten at Reena Spaulings). More recent work centers on consumer gadgets and screens.
LCD and Screen-Based Works
Kokopeli’s LCD-related pieces treat electronic media as sculptural objects rather than dematerialized images. He often sources commercial devices (transparent LCD cabinets, LCD monitors, LED screens, rings with tiny displays, touchpad-style display cases, etc., sometimes from Alibaba) and combines them with physical objects, resin/fabric figures, and video.
Key examples include:
- With Friends Like You (2023): Transparent LCD cabinets/vitrines holding physical cobblestones, with semi-transparent digital screens intermittently overlaying video of cobblestones. This collapses distinctions between object, image, and screen while referencing consumption, gentrification, and the vitrine as a site of display.
- “Playsets” (2025), such as Times Square Alliance Playset and Literature & Painting Playset: LCD cabinets containing sculpted (often South Park-like or cartoonish) figures made of resin, fabric, and mixed media. Transparent displays or LED screens animate facial features, mouths, and movements over the static physical bodies. The accompanying videos feature monologues, sampled online texts (e.g., Reddit), accounting tips, artistic patronage talk, lectures (including on Hieronymus Bosch), New Year’s countdown speeches, or remixed pop songs. These emphasize the physical presence of the figures in space while the screens supply the “animation” and voice.
- Other devices in shows like MY TV SHOW I ❤ TV (Reena Spaulings, 2025): Modified televisions, gadget hybrids (including rings that play video and merchandise-style display cases), and objects looping 1990s educational television content (sometimes produced by the artist’s mother) on topics like bullying or reporting harassment. The exhibition has been described as staging a kind of technology trade fair that highlights half-baked nostalgia, low-res effects, and the continued objecthood of screens.
- Phonecall 6 (2025): An HD video work (approx. 69 minutes) incorporating an LCD monitor along with steel, resin, paper, motherboard, plywood, felt, and fabric; it is in the MoMA collection.
Critics note that these works underscore how even in a “hyper-digital” era, media remains stubbornly sculptural: screens are desired as outsized, touchable, portable, or vitrine-like objects, and the content on them can feel secondary to the physical device. Themes of millennial media nostalgia, the appropriation of consumer tech, and the dialectic between image and objecthood recur across the pieces.
Kokopeli has also appeared in group shows such as Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1 and has recent solo presentations focused on related ideas (including rings and vitrines at Gladstone). His output overall mixes handmade or appropriated materials with digital elements to probe how identity, consumption, and media culture take physical form.
Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings at Art Basel Paris 2026. Paris (France), October 22, 2026.
