“Comfort Accomplished” it certainly couldn’t have been called. Unfortunately, the group show Comfort Potential, currently exhibiting at Transformer, fails to live up to any such standard. Sara Dierck, Vincent Lamouroux, and Gabriel Martinez fill the tiny gallery with two to three works a piece, displaying their attempts to interact with society and, one assumes, contribute some comfort to the world at large. Instead, a couple of these artists don’t seem to live very comfortably in the society with which they seek to interact. The work comes off as immature in its simplification of complex problems and proffered solutions, and even borderline condescending as we – as the society in question – are alternatively ridiculed and rewarded according to the artists’ apparently far superior opinions.

Sara Dierck is a photographer who “intervenes” with the world around her and documents it with her camera. Her Safety Catalogue Series is a collection of four 20” x 24” photographs, each one a glossy advertisement that mocks our society’s obsession with safety and cleanliness. In Air in a can, Dierck laughs at our germ-phobias by “selling” us a compressed air can (the type you’d use to clean your keyboard) to use to blow out candles on a cake. Even the frosting gets its dig with “Happy Birthday and Good Luck,” a moment before the entire thing is destroyed by the force of the “clean” air. The heavy-handed irony continues in Chemical resistant gloves and standard business envelope, as two latex covered hands fill the envelope with anthrax-looking confectioner’s sugar.

In a certain sense, Dierck might have a point: it’s true we might be obsessed with our health and safety, occasionally to the point of absurdity. But it’s a problem without a solution, and to think we all should simply calm down, in the face of preventing illness and needless death, is naïve and even destructive, when it’s those people she seems to view as “hysterical” who also end up giving us the seat-belt and the smallpox vaccine.