Rachel Youn turns secondhand machines into eerie kinetic sculptures

The machines keep trying

A neck massager, a baby rocker, a walking pad, and a vacuum cleaner all look different on a curb or a resale feed. In Rachel Youn’s hands, they become a strange family of moving bodies, rebuilt with artificial flowers, metal hardware, and used electronic components until they seem to hover between care object and creature.

Youn sources those machines from Facebook Marketplace, eBay, thrift stores, and other online listings, then rewires the motors to bypass automatic shutoff features so the sculptures keep moving while galleries are open. That choice matters as much as the objects themselves. These are not pristine consumer gadgets fresh from the box. They are already in their second life, carrying the marks of the market that sold them, the household that outgrew them, and the culture that often replaces repair with disposal.

What the objects reveal about consumer life

The work has been described as exploring automated satisfaction, inevitable failure, self-improvement consumerism, care, intimacy, and the uncanny humanlike qualities of replicas and failed objects. That is exactly where Youn’s sculptures become most pointed. The devices are built to soothe, strengthen, rock, vibrate, and tidy, but in the gallery they behave like exhausted stand-ins for the promises attached to modern consumer tech.

That tension is what makes the work feel so contemporary. The sculptures are made from the kinds of household machines Americans buy to manage pain, improve posture, simulate exercise, or automate comfort, then discard when they break, age out, or stop fitting a routine. Youn’s practice gives those products an afterlife, but not a neat one. The pieces keep moving, yet the motion feels strained, as if the machine is still trying to fulfill a function that has already slipped away.

Artificial flowers, faux comfort, and the uncanny body

Youn often pairs these devices with artificial orchids or other faux flora, pushing the sculptures further from utility and closer to an invented organism. Slow Burn, for example, combines an artificial orchid, a neck massager, and metal hardware, a mix that turns a familiar self-care product into something that reads as both decorative and bodily. The result is not a joke about gadget culture so much as a precise visual argument about what comfort looks like after it has been detached from the human being it was meant to serve.

That same logic runs through related works built from shiatsu massagers, automated baby rockers, vibration platform machines, riding exercise simulators, chi swings, baby swings, and walking bands. In later pieces, Youn has included spring horse frames, polyurethane swivel casters, stainless steel bird spikes, broken tire jacks, and Arduino-servo components alongside artificial orchids and other repurposed parts. The combination is oddly intimate: soft petals against industrial hardware, therapy-device ergonomics against objects that clearly no longer do what their marketing promised.

How the sculptures are assembled

The work’s technical side is part of its meaning. Youn rewires motors to keep the sculptures running past the safety systems built into the original products, which means the pieces are not static readymades but active constructions. That constant movement gives the work its eerie charge. The sculpture appears to need the viewer’s attention in the same way a body asks to be cared for, even though the object is made from castoff parts that were originally designed to serve someone else.

This is where the art’s relationship to repair culture becomes most visible. The pieces are not simply recycled and they are not fully restored. They occupy the middle ground where consumer goods are stripped, repurposed, and made to perform a new identity. In a country where resale platforms and thrift stores increasingly function as an informal second market for tech and household equipment, Youn’s sculptures feel like a portrait of circulation itself: a product does not disappear when it leaves the store, it just changes hands until its original purpose becomes unrecognizable.

A career built through changing displays of motion

Youn’s exhibition history shows how steadily this language has developed. Gather appeared in the Great Rivers Biennial 2020 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and ran from September 11, 2020, to February 21, 2021. No Pain No Gain followed at Sargent’s Daughters in New York from July 7 to August 13, 2022, then Well Adjusted at Night Gallery in Los Angeles from September 23 to October 28, 2023. Restraint returned to Sargent’s Daughters from December 14, 2023, to January 27, 2024, before Pleasure Circuit opened at Soy Capitán in Berlin from September 11 to November 2, 2024. NO SWEAT ran at G Gallery in Seoul from April 20 to May 31, 2025, and Factory Doomscroll closed at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on April 4, 2026, after opening on February 21.

That geographic spread matters. The work has traveled through St. Louis, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Seoul, with international exhibitions also placing Youn’s practice in dialogue with audiences in Hong Kong. The sculptures’ concerns are local and global at once: they are rooted in the everyday life of consumer tech, yet they speak fluently to a wider art conversation about bodies, systems, and the exhaustion built into both.

The artist behind the machines

Born in 1994 in Abington, Pennsylvania, Youn earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and later completed an MFA at the Yale School of Art. Youn also received the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award, a recognition that helped mark the early consolidation of this practice. The path from Pennsylvania to St. Louis to Yale tracks a career that has steadily expanded the scale of the work without losing its original premise: the ordinary machine can become uncanny the moment it is stripped of convenience and asked to perform something more unstable.

That is the deeper value of Youn’s sculptures. They do not just reuse consumer products; they expose the emotional life built into them. A massager, a rocker, or a walking pad is supposed to promise ease, care, or self-improvement. In Youn’s hands, the same object becomes a reminder that those promises are often temporary, mechanical, and vulnerable to failure. What remains is motion, and the uneasy feeling that the afterlife of consumer tech is already happening around us.