Aaron Hoffman

Case Sensitive occupies the ground as an illuminated, oversized grill form, its single continuous tube of red neon bent into 46 controlled curves. The title holds a double meaning: the hierarchy of upper and lower case, and the notion of a “case” as a study. Hovering between electric stovetop and gas grill, the work draws on the domestic object as a site of memory, trauma, and repetition.

The glowing tube traps and ionises gas, slowly reaching full intensity, suggesting heat, flesh, and arrested violence. Positioned as a potential obstacle, the sculpture oscillates between consumer display, bodily metaphor, and machine. It reflects on how technologies designed for daily life may also carry the spectre of collective harm, collapsing intimacy and brutality into a single, continuous line of light.

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This wall-based work combines appropriated street photography from the 2004 Folsom Street Fair with the animated figure of Pinocchio, rendered in a unified blue duotone. A working fire extinguisher is mounted directly onto the image, partially wrapped in its surface, collapsing representation and object into one charged field.

The juxtaposition of explicit queer pride with a cartoon puppet who longs to become “real” foregrounds tensions between fantasy and embodiment, freedom and containment. The instructional title, drawn from the operational steps of a fire extinguisher, suggests both emergency response and suppression. Identity here is staged as combustible: visible, excessive, celebratory, yet always shadowed by the impulse to control, extinguish, or manage its fire.