Leopards: Two works that take Kafka’s aphorism involving leopards (date unknown) reflect on the production of culture through repetition and contingency, rather than through the notion of tradition as a stable or fixed novelty. The leopards break into a temple, they drink from the sacrificial pitchers without regard for customs, but as they repeat this act, over and over, they themselves become the forgers of a sacred ritual, now embedded, practiced, and routine. Repetition and imitation transform the exceptional into the habitual, returning it to foundational modes of learning (ABC’s), which underpin both cultural formation and practical pedagogy. The leopards featured in two wall sculptures, assembled in the loose form of a child’s puzzle, reference these learning structures. Their colourful, playful forms introduce a note of naïvete that compliments the parable’s meditation on religion and ceremony. These sculptures are accompanied by a pair of silkscreen prints that reproduce the text of Kafka’s aphorism.

Laughter: Ridendo was a French medical journal published in the 1930s that used humour as a means of entertaining physicians. The title derives from the Latin phrase castigat ridendo mores, commonly translated as “one corrects customs by laughing at them,” positioning satire as a mechanism for social reform. This section draws on two images from the journal. The first depicts two doctors, one holding a mask of the other’s face, producing a visual scene of doubling, misrecognition, and reflection. Four impressions are consolidated into this single work, undoing the idea of an ‘edition’, and existing as a singular unique thing. The second image presents a doctor-thinker mounted to a dry-erase board. As with two previous works of Long’s, the figure is locked into a perpetual state of repetitive contemplation, unable to move forward into action.

Razors, Drift: A series of three works take as their subject the American businessman King Camp Gillette (1855–1932) and his failed utopian ideals. While he is credited with inventing the disposable razor blade in the early twentieth century and along with it the highly capitalist profit-oriented “razor and blade” business model, he previously imagined and designed a never-realised moneyless, car-less socialist utopia, which was to be located near and powered by Niagara Falls. Long reflects on these contradictions in a portrait that renders Gillette through multiple, simultaneous viewpoints, foregrounding the internal contradictions of his persona, which veer between visionary change-maker and rampant capitalist. Eight editions of a two-colour silkscreen print overlaid into a single frame show Gillette in the garden of his estate. As with an earlier piece by Long on Henry Ford, the work’s layered repetitions cause a “stutter” or “drift” across the frame; a fugitive image, as ungraspable as Gillett’s utopian vision. The narrative wants to proceed forward, but is stuck in an endless loop. An accompanying mosaic floor piece mirrors the blueprint of Gillette’s metropolis. An additional work, taken from one of Gillette’s books, shows ‘Man Corporate,’ the epitome of the modernist machismo project, undone by a grubby fingerprint found on the reverse of the page.

Taken together, these three seemingly disparate components intersect through shared concerns with repetition, pedagogy, and the failures of the male, modernist project. Kafka frames culture as a process of continual reproduction through change; Gillette’s ghosted repetitions remain locked into a perpetual stammer; while the Ridendo figure never moves beyond the realm of thought and laughter.