"Involuntary"

Guest curator Neville Wakefield presents a group exhibition filled with such hot names as Ryan McGinley, Miranda Lichtenstein and Laurel Nakadate. The theme revolves around the body's unconscious responses (breathing, yawning, etc.), but the show also touches upon the melodramatic history of the Ford Project space itself: It's located in a duplex penthouse that was once home to Edna Crawford Champion (second wife of Albert Champion, the French-born spark-plug mogul) and her lover, another Frenchman named Charles Brazelle. The story goes that in 1927, Albert died after a massive heart attack brought on by a beating at Brazelle's hands in a Paris nightclub. Never charged with Champion's murder, Brazelle eventually killed Edna during a quarrel in their high-rise love nest; Edna's bodyguards promptly threw Brazelle out the window. Her ghost supposedly haunted the apartment's next occupants, driving one of them to a nervous breakdown. Hopefully, no one in Wakefield's show will suffer a similar fate.