Mrs. is very pleased to announce the gallery’s latest partnership with our Maspeth neighbors, the Knockdown Center. Since 2023, Mrs. has curated three of Knockdown’s “FiftyTwo Ft. series;” a long-term wall-based artwork installed in the Center’s East Corridor at 52-19 Flushing Avenue. For the third collaboration, preceded by Mark Mulroney and Chris Bogia, Mrs. presents a new large-scale work by Tyler Lafreniere titled Happy retirement.

The image of retirement is inseparable from our visions of 1950s Americana: the good old days, when pensions and Social Security promised a soft landing after a lifetime of work—green lawns, Sunday drives, time at last, time at last. All those years of clock punching in service of a single goal: the moment when work could finally stop.

In a culture formed by capitalistism, work is how we construct our value. What, then, are those who no longer work? If we’re taught that identity and purpose are produced through labor, what does it mean to strive for so many years to escape it?

We toil and labor for the day we can be formally shelved.  The promise we work toward, then, is a celebration of our own obsolescence. 

But at least you got a watch.

-Tyler Lafreniere

Tyler Lafreniere (b.1983) is a visual artist based in Queens, NY. In 2006, Lafreniere earned his BA in Fine Art from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. During his undergraduate studies, he also concentrated in Printmaking at Goldsmiths University in London. He has held solo exhibitions at LAUNCH F18, New York, NY. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York including Rachel Uffner Gallery, Shrine Gallery, Deanna Evans, 5-50 Gallery, Field Projects, and Sharon Arts Center as well as Big Pictures LA, Los Angeles, CA and Art Institute of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH.

Happy retirement is on view at Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Ave., Maspeth, Queens, NY 11378. For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.