Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The directness of its depiction is satisfying like a sign painter's numbers, a dumbness relieving against the muddled intentions of more artistic means. Like late Guston's plodding brush making hamfistedly evident its recording of painting, Shimizu's brushwork is the bones conjuring the apparition, the image's appearance, to be there incredibly plain: a plush otter holding a starfish. Their almost autistic commitment to the deadpan delivery of depiction pityably endearing.


Past: Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Gretta Johnson at Mesler / Feuer

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The shaped painting has been making a resurgence, there's a whole show of them across the city, but whereas historically the shaped painting invested in the painting/object tension, bulging and large, the youthful revitalizing of it have a preoccupation with its flatness acting as icon, rather than a tension of a paintng become object, an image become object.

Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi

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The exhaustive potential of pleasure is further and further documented, enacted continuously. Interface - from CNN's talking heads to Matchmaking apps to bus ads - survive on their fittest evolving further adept stimulation of our primitive emotional wiring. WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. Brätsch's use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies"  - is beautifully exhausting, like our tears forming jewels.


See too: DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts

(Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts)

Cushioning their hard edges with padded walls of cartoons that allowed the wiley Coyote to suffer enormous blunt trauma because he was soft stretchable taffy amplifying the ambiguity of Benning's drawing against the inserted images which are hard immalleable records against the malleable flesh of the body, the equally amorphous icons.

Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

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Dental anatomy, some of our first experiences of being medically manipulated and on a regular basis while awake a man drilling holes into your skull's open mouth and drooling. A pump and vacuum system to suck the spit so it doesn't fall down your throat and choke you. While most medical instruments are at pains to round themselves into soft contours reminiscent of the bodies they attend the dental is stainless medieval, which like horror films preoccupation with the torture reminding us of our corporeal selves. Torture is eased by the promise of death, the dental gives no such respite. Duchamp himself hired a dental mechanic in creating Étant donnés, using dental plastic to invoke the body in one of four "erotic sculptures." All which were negatives of the body, and none too specific, but overwhelmingly sexual. The biomorphic ambiguity invokes the body better than any specific image, the ambiguous evokes feelings which we relate to corporeality rather a concrete image we would relate to as information. It's why what is unseen has such stronger potential in torture scenes, ears cropped or arms chainsawed. We don't actually get to see our teeth be worked, but we feel the drill, the needle prick, the picking, scraping and pressure of tools near our soft sensitive gums, our bodies' manipulator, our strong associations with the dental.




See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo , Klara Lidén Alicia Frankovich at Kurator. Martin Wong at P.P.O.W, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Michael E. Smith at Zero

"...like bodily stones complicates the minimalist mantra that what you see is what you see, because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats beginning to look like the lap of a heavily tanned, taught, and naked man."


Past: Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo

"...as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc... The architectural model exists as a plan scalable and virtual. The mix of real scales and virtual scales - a pipe standing in for piping - a vertiginous collapse, our proprioception lost in relation vibrates."

Past: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

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The sign destroyed sculpture. Serra could not make something so big. The physical manifestation, the billboard is made to crush distance. By sheer determination of size it virtualizes space by collapsing distance between you and it, seen from two parking lots away. Turns the world plastic. Are designed with intent. Against the night the billboard burns with energy to grab you. The sign is made to penetrate, legibility as force. Legibility like attentional assault. Mental buggery with the wet muscle of signification replacing the consensual. It takes an equal determination to not see the sign for what it intends, replace itself with what it intends, the world with information. Hope: An exhibition of Giacometti sculptures and Neon.


See too: Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

"They become inhuman in their enlargement, no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter over its needs, forcing themselves upon you by bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size, a shift in scale to assert their indifference towards yours."

Past: Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

“Madames Electrics” at The Pit

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Desssins Communiqués, a drawing game of telephone. Passed images morph over their transactions to see in time advantageous elements selected and grow. The memorable details live on. They "survive" memory's editing process in social/formal evolution. Shuffled and removed from the order of their evolution the fossil record becomes a pit of echoing influence, structuring the exhibition as room of mirrors, and questions of chicken or the egg's pole position.