Zoe Leonard at Galleria Raffaella Cortese

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Like the Calendar's mechanization of time, photography too asserts its frame as an artificial blocking. Of the world it renders like little cubes of meat, morsels. Of life that it embalms. Real geopolitical borders if you know what I mean. So the attempts to blur these lines with the filmic language of frames, with TIME, an attempt to give artifical motion, motion, life, is an admittance or benevolence, to the world butchered into cuts. Suppose you were about to be executed, which size axe would you choose for your piecemealing?

 Past: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Stuff, decay, waste, time; data visualization has become hot button for business, the ability to represent comes the ability to wield it, and not necessarily inhuman, around for ages with the question: how to mark time. ... In attempts to see subjective scales of time, we see wear on shoes, stores closing, passports stamped, fruit rotting in vain. Leonard's practice seems in establishing marks to gauge the rise and fall of water, the rising and falling breath of the city. Stores close, cities revitalize, we pack and move, the body wears, the books become obsolete, our fruits into the floor, the water changes but the falls are still the same, is the point seemed to be made.

Full: Zoe Leonard at Whitney Museum

Peggy Ahwesh at Photography Exhibit

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A myth that art should "speak for itself." So art always attempts hiding the text that it has become reliant on. Surreptitiously holds up the newspaper that acts as "proof of life," that there is thinking, that its corpus is still product, producing, useful. But admitting to the hostage situation is structurally more interesting than pretending it's simply class photo day, that artworks aren't at gunpoint of meaning. 

Past: Pentti Monkkonen

"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own."

"The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist."

"That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject."

"...Painting as advert for its claim to avert chaos. Pretending, like me, to, against a law of the universe, produce order worth burning."

Past: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(3) Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(2), Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(1), "Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Past: Jef Geys

If Geys' work is confusing, ever shifting, it is because it voids itself of the general markers that usually demarcate its sense/use/meaning.  Geys' don't necessarily ordain a use, something "used to finish our homework" but instead images which flight in and out of an ability to read them for information. A language we are not necessarily tasked with translating but ascertaining whether meaning at all. 

"...the bluntest blankest things forcing interest everywhere besides the art, is for Geys more a process of stuffing your navel elegantly full of mirrors to gaze en abyme into it, packing them tightly, pristinely, to see a hall of navels winking like eyes, the rules of Gey's objects - well indexed in the PR - redirecting you through this hallowed hall of art..."



Click for full: Geys at Essex Street, Jef Geys at Air de Paris

Art is the scissors. The canvas is the petri dish. The gallery is the imbecile's microscope. The artist is dead. The Press Release incants. The mall to explode again. You need a lot less bronze, with scissors this big. With wreckage this cool. All these Hot Topics to cut and crop meaning, from air. A bronzed trash purchased meaning from culture. It is my daily routine. My childhood. Manifesting a picture book of existence. For the blue not yet having had it. For have you heard of these cabinets they contain curiosities, I have cut from Life, this meaning. Which is French. How do you say Souvenir in French? Because, I painted it, you are required to care. A butterfly kill jar. Running on fumes. Composition to taste. Oh with scissors this big, I can cut an airplane, in half. Having invented a new cubism, can cut anything in half. In quarters. There is nothing art cannot quarter. Except interest, which is the cutting part.

Nika Kutateladze at Modern Art

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What is it with painters and the wastelands? Is it that the plains mirror the virtual plane of imagination, the blank void of painting, ready for projection?

The Wasteland: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Maryam Hoseini at High Art

Michael Andrew Page at Project Native Informant

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If you stack enough tents, do you get a glass stained cathedral? Preferably it is arbitrary methods to render an agnostic psychedelia. Rather than using a kaleidoscope to retroactively put a halo on its "content." It's a question of which direction we're looking, back towards the dwelling that loosely underpins these or towards the painting we should be dwelling. Cloister or Claustrum. Rendering its symbols into neuter meaninglessness seems more interesting than making something of folding tents. The confusion of church and tents, its a metaphor for painting, sure, but let's separate church and technology of lead solder.

Anselm Reyle at Tick Tack

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This is just the epitome. The window display to.. what were already window displays? Reyle got blue chip on the petri-dishization of the flashy facade - a taxonomics of our shiny attracted culture. Turned iridescence into "contemplation." Simply by cutting it out and placing it in art's frame. It was way ahead of our current mass culture cargo cult art. But in an era of "experiential" Van Gogh, Ice Cream Museum, Meow Wolf, this seems either criminally lagging or dear please no future.

Past: Jacob Kassay

It's an old advertising truism that a every consumer, even the jaded, buys the emotions associated with a product more than the product itself. The buy-in being a broad sense of any investment, monetary, social, symbolic or otherwise. When selling a chair from a glossy mail order catalog photograph it on a beach to associate a lifestyle. Imagine these objects without this backdrop.
And so is CAD a lifestyle mail order catalog? No, but Kassay sorta makes it look like one. Which is funny. Using the imbuing qualities of setting/documentation to perform its totemisms.

Technologic performance, installation awkwardness, actual dance etc., it's an increasing strategy to imbue art commodities with some sort of gesticulated spell called aura, symbolical capital, etc. "An action to the conjure the documentation." Which then the documentation won't document too closely.

Full:Jacob Kassay at von ammon co, Jacob Kassay at Fitzpatrick-Leland House

Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw at Towards

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Words like "investigates," "interprets," "studies" are the satanic ritual for invoking art's eternal torment. Art's perpetual state of doing, art must never be done - instead a death-in-life mule generating MEANING. Meaning which has become itself a verb, its throbbing false pulse, kept alive for the sucking of more PR fodder. No PR will tell you it is done, what has been done, only the hell of "contemplates" "addresses" "elaborates""questions" "synthesizes" - words which action but cleverly never finalize. A hole digging but never dug. Thus art too becomes compositionalized stuf (reassembly of the mall), a Frankenstein corpse of culture look at it lumber, it is walking toward. Look at it walking toward.