New York City
May 8 - 11, 2025
U-Haul Gallery is excited to announce Ben Nuñez: Today, Last Year, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition includes four days from the artist’s Panopticon project that saw him record his waking life for a year with an AXON police body camera.
Calling to mind the year-long endurance projects of Tehching Hsieh and the video diaries of Jonas Mekas, Nuñez presents the banality of daily life through a lens historically reserved for communicating acts of violence. Panopticon is a personalized meditation on our relationship with technology and documentation; an exploration of our obsession with candor and authenticity online.
His days are unfiltered, providing an intimate, at times disturbing, window into Nuñez’s world. From vacations and bike rides to doomscrolling and getting fired from work, Panopticon is an immediate reflection of a tangible, relatable life. To Nuñez “we are the echo of a virtue signal,” reducing ourselves to manufactured internet personas that, for some, have become more real than their lived experience.