Past: Talia Chetrit at Sies + Hoke 

"The particular fabric of business suits and the explicitness of world's origin selfies' rawness makes for an interesting fetishistic photography."

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co. and Tina Braegger at Friends Indeed

(Overduin, Friends)

Perform our little tortures of cultures. Twisting its nipples to make it say uncle, make it "speak." This stands for criticality. A corpse forced to dance with all the electricity of abstraction. Take culture, give it a little stir. This is our auto-ritual. This is how we make it "mean." Stand in for meaning. These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts. 

See too:Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co., Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris, “No Joke” at Milieu

Cassandra Press, Kandis Williams at LAXART, Los Angeles

(link)

Cassandra Press is good and interesting thing and this is an exhibition to put the laurels around that. Basically proof that more interesting "aesthetic politics" exist, it isn't whatever generation of conceptual navel gazing we're on. (Possibly this is because what has become "aesthetic politics" has been so gelatinized by art discourse PR that the "political" itself has become a non-sequitur.) So much so that just recollecting discourse for a reader is more interesting. Just like an imaged wall of culture is more interesting than a wall of art. The point is that, like Jafa, we can be direct without sacrificing art's poetic opening.

Past: Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

"... the stylistically performative running the permutations of their look. ... aptly describe the loss of your viewer-self within, metaphor for the free floating body that everyone everywhere is at pains to describe but not touch. So we’ll say it here, it hurts to touch nothing. So when looking at the coldness and feeling the stylistic chrome they contain know it’s a real possibility."

Read: Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

grounded at Berthold Pott

(link)

"Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Which this show takes literally. Less a criticism than the exhibition understanding, reifying, the cultural ether. This is what these shows do. Catalog the wreckage. 

No couch!

(link)

No couch! Amazing! 10/10. What a performance. In all the wildest dreams...

see too: Summer's couches, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

Darkened Rooms, their couches

(Top, Center, Bottom)

It's nice on these hot days, to have all these promotional images of dark rooms, to keep our brains cool. The couch becomes the main signifier. We're going to start a collection of these, send in your own finds. Which will you choose? What does your couch say about you?

 Past: Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

"Meise's 15 years of reproduction of modernist tropes in awkward phrasings is, like Raoul de Keyser, its visual aberration:  Meise's (or de Keyser's) irregulairty forces a recognition of their having been a regularity, a system of rules to which these avoid conforming. ... allowing inference to see why these wouldn't have been acceptable then ... Like, placing the thing outside the circle allows the circle to be seen at all."

Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

Manuela Gernedel Alice Select, Berlin

(link)

Transplanting content into a different frame, here a dishwasher.  The white space of art becomes the cube of watery dispatch. Anything in it will get wet, clean. A fantasy.

Past: Phillip Lai

"What Romance! The remnants, records and romance of the hand, the touch. The expressionist stroke absorbed into sculptural gesture, a sensitivity so heightened they feel stunted by their own fetish of sense.  The fetishistic attention to details which remind us of all the sexual deviant's interest in attachments, space, and knots, the fetishist knowns the beauty of his knot is bearer of his love, the pleasure in pained restraint."

Phillip Lai at Modern Art

NADA House 2021 at NADA House, Govenors Island

(link)

I swear these walls are not white but that new shade of CAD background grey (#ebebeb). The walls were whiter in 2019. I'm not saying we've painted, they didn't, we're just adjusting our visuality - there's new settings on our frame. This new one is more cake like, frosted even, a more indulgent cream. 

see too: A new grey