Joshua Abelow, Katya Kirilloff at Romantic Acquaintances

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Its interpretation is already supplied with the obvious: "opening a can of worms." It's already there, laying on the table of your head. It seems to muzzle thought with it. There's nothing left to open. A clot of interpretation, hard to think around. Attempting to back up a bit is only the critic's attempt to create another can, which, erudite preservationist they are, may demonstrate their prowess in opening, sealing. That the rabbit must arrive unharmed at the other side is lost on most critics embalming. But whose hat, can, worm, rabbit, is this? Our problems bottled all the way down, art is the canning factory, of worms. The only thing worse than a worm in your apple? A whole can gone bad of them. Is this your hand or mine?

cameron clayborn at Morán Morán

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Not looking different but looking affected different. Chewed, digested, rubbed. Not really sculpted. A figure that's more accumulated by abuse of handwork <-- That's a metaphor.  Like Eraserhead too "mocks and assesses the event of the family portrait." Everyone's wounded, welcome, here's your artistic panacea. 

See too: Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

Joseph Olisaemeka at Derek Eller Gallery

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An interesting tactic: painting the farm "despite having little to no knowledge of farming ecosystems."  Painting what you don't know, you can only paint the preconceived cultural idea, your own expectations. This sounds like a criticism but it's the opposite: this is plein air myth. There's a depth. Like von Wulffen, history roils up from behind. Like, history bruises the present moment. The big looming past. A past in the shadows. Haunts. Not present in the main narrative. The foreground is today bright and hard to see past. Built into the effect of how we paint today. An interest in the depth of the inkblot.

See too: Amelie von Wulffen,  forgetful surrealism

A Pox of Interpretability

Maybe this is our doodad moment, our whispery whatevers. Everything is covered in charms. Writ with runes. Noodly bits. Our arms littered with the christmas lights of stick and poke tattoo. NASCAR vests of the nonobjective. Stickers on College macbooks. Crazy people bumpers. An outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. 

Edvard Munch, Trevor Shimizu at VI, VII, Oslo

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Have you seen the chart? This exhibition proves it, the retrograde, paintings like puncture holes, folding the time continuum to wormhole a pencil through it, write an extra zero on the check. 

Past: Trevor Shimizu

"...late Monet, before his cataracts surgery, the rusting of his pastiche into yellow lumps, all but blind. Their gross mismanagement of color failing to materialize his prettiness. You watch a master, hampered, fail. Late Monet, like Soutine painted a colonoscopy. Shimizu's, ditching the coprophagia, have almost the opposite but equally compelling problem, a prettiness for which there is no reason - you watch failure produce horrible beauty. "

Read full: Trevor Shimizu at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project, Trevor Shimizu at Misako & Rosen

Yusuke Saito at PAGE (NYC)

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Which the point, both pizza and painting must conjure desire, edible or erudite. There's some fun in that world: imagining a Rothko you can take a bite of. At base, both P formats touch on some primeval instinct, desire. The switcheroo of painting's distanced judgement with the less socially clouded appreciation for pizza makes the point a bit clearer - there is a less than high basement to our admirations. There will be no food critic telling you to enjoy worms on your pizza, but there is always an art critic who will. 

Past: Sayre Gomez

CAWD in Gomez World

Catalog essay for Sayre Gomez's World

"Whereas the airbrush once depilated the speedo lines of advertorial flesh for family friendly consumption, it now sprays surfaces with excrement. Advertising’s methods applying our tragedy. Right outside the window, a blue sky’s trumpets soar: a landfill. And with it all the embalming and disenabling of feeling. Golden light on marketing banners themselves. The clown sunsets - in all their cliché effect - is already sorry waste. Commercial and photo techniques on our sadness is irony."

Past: Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

"Berger's exhibitions look like group shows, filled to the brim with objects inconsistent. If outward appearance needs consistency to "make sense," if fashion is meant as an expression of its subject, the wearer, we could draw a line from Berger's fashion discourses earlier to now: a breakdown in objects ability to communicate its subject, artist or wearer...."


read full: Anna-Sophie Berger at JTT

Elke Denda at Josey

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Organization implies logic, which suggests meaning, which we're desperate for.  We are machines for, evolved to, this pattern recognition. You can torture this relentlessly. PR stating "teases at recognition that never quite arrives at its referent" - this is the definition of poetic. Incredibly affective. 

See too: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

Magnus Plessen at Mai 36

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Pretty desperate to know where this ends up hanging.

Dominique Knowles at Hannah Hoffman Gallery

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The use of "memory" in art generally finances loathsome schmaltz, turning the weight of concrete into gold bars of MEANING. Dusty, half-remembered paintings would feel like a slight but its true, they receding, they returning to the dust they will become. A world or a child, trying to recall a horse. Trying to remember how painting was. It is stupid blurry, worthless, it is weightlessly gone. Less memory than foreboding. More futuristic than most sci-fi tech.  

Catharine Czudej at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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From last exhibition's moribund gloom to this one's concrete clowning provides a whiplash we could call slapstick. The comic whateverness. These clown jewels. But like last time eventually someone turns on the light, cleans up, eventually the parachute disappears and we're left with with walls forced to carry expensive rocks, no levity at all. No balloon, just concrete. No criticality, just painting. The sign eventually wins over its irony, there will just be jewel. We have to learn this again and again and again we never learn. 

Past: Nancy Lupo

Like eye goo, stuf's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean.

Stuf becomes subject. Curdles a skin, a flake to slough. Contaminates, spreads. "Disposable." "Flushable." Problems in city pipes, amassing with congealed human grease to create clogs from hell. "Behold The Fatberg: London's 130-Ton, 'Rock-Solid' Sewer Blockage" A world unable to contain our disposability. Reamasses elsewhere.. in nightmares.

Read full: Nancy Lupo at Sydney, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Nancy Lupo & Monique Mouton at Veda

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Photographs" devoid of context become functionally useless - making them feel thin, not suited for our age of images mass trained for "engagement,""likes," advertorial smiling. (Its why gallery instagrams are desperate for those Happy Birthday! headshots - over their limitless holdings of art - abstraction is mere slop in the feed.) And these above rightfully own the wallpaper they are. That thinness, that feeling of lack is simply not selling us on something.

Bradley Kronz at Friart

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Craftsperson of the wasteland would seem a timely moniker as the gallery becomes the cargo-cult reliquary of our cultural wasteland. i.e. Place the coke bottle in the gallery, watch it attract aura type-of-art. (See too: Why do group shows always looks like you blew up a shopping mall?) But Kronz missed the memo on letting the whitecube do the work - instead putting all this sweat into his own personal orgone accumulators, all hands toward wasteland contraptions for... framing? Big question mark there. But frames were the original aura accumulators and I think Kronz is all about trying to build a frame from the standpoint of someone who has never seen but had read about them before the endtimes. 

See too: Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space

Past: Heimo Zobernig

[The work's] banality incites questioning - disinteresting objects must expel interest elsewhere - and exposes its stage to skepticism - institutional critique. The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from hats irrupts a comedy at the depths of that hat.

There is no bedrock to terrible things.

Read full: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel (2)

Tolia Astakhishvili at Bonner Kunstverein

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Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.

artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust. 

The Model becomes predominate 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. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday... 

See too: Simon Fujiwara, The Model, Anna Zacharoff at Kantine, Ghislaine Leung at Reading International