Opening Reception for Jordan Eagles, Khajistan, and Duke Riley
Join Pioneer Works in a public opening celebration of Jordan Eagles: Bases Loaded, Khajistan: Office of War Information (O.W.I.), and Duke Riley: Pigeoneer Works.
Bases Loaded is an exhibition by Jordan Eagles that uses baseball, long mythologized as “America’s pastime,” to reflect on team, identity, and belonging in contemporary American culture. Since the late 1990s, Eagles has investigated the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of blood as a central artistic material. Through installation, sculpture, photography, and painting, his work examines the rhetoric of blood and the contradictions embedded in biased policies. A lifelong Mets fan, Eagles draws inspiration from a slogan found on blood donor T-shirts distributed at Citi Field: “Mets are in our blood.” While the sentiment speaks to community and devotion, it also reveals the exclusion of many in the LGBTQI+ community from blood donation due to discriminatory policies. The artist recontextualizes this phrase to question who gets to belong: to a team, a family, a nation.
Since 2021, Khajistan, the archive and publishing platform founded by filmmaker and archivist Saad Khan, has preserved and digitized censored, banned, and underrepresented media from regions spanning North Africa to South Asia. Office of War Information (O.W.I.) reimagines the mechanisms of state propaganda as an office in decay. Printers continuously reproduce U.S. military leaflets distributed across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya between 1990 and 2022, while computer terminals invite visitors to explore a digital archive of these materials and their translations. Extending back to World War II, the exhibition draws visual and rhetorical links between contemporary and historical propaganda campaigns, revealing the enduring narratives that justify war as reluctant yet necessary. Operating as both a bureaucratic machine and public archive, O.W.I. demonstrates how design and language continue to shape public perception and policy on global conflict.
Also on view on the roof, Duke Riley’s Pigeoneer Works is a sculptural installation and fully functioning pigeon coop that continues the artist’s exploration of urban ecology, interspecies collaboration, and the hidden histories embedded in city life. Drawing from Brooklyn’s deep-rooted pigeon-keeping traditions, the work revives a practice once celebrated across the borough’s working-class neighborhoods, where pigeons served as messengers, navigators, and early agents of communication. By installing a rooftop coop at Pioneer Works, Riley rekindles this history and repositions pigeons not as urban nuisances, but as collaborators and ambassadors of the natural world.