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A hand with pink painted nails reaches across a cluttered nightstand, pops open a pill bottle, then latches onto a glass of bourbon. And so we meet Nora, the overbearing mother of Waylon, an eleven-year-old who wets his pants ("four times this week"). Nora and Waylon are the main characters in Luis Gispert's video Smother, 2006-2007, the centerpiece of the artist's recent two-part exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery and Zach Feuer Gallery. In the film, which is set in 1980s Miami, mother and son inhabit a pastel palace decorated with etched mirrors, Art Deco sconces, and Patrick Nagel prints. Bequeathed to them by Waylon's drug-dealing father, the home is a baroque setting equal parts Miami Vice and...
