Miho Dohi at Crèvecœur

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Tuttle's never really resembled, their garbage was formal compositions from whatever looking like nothing more than art. They looked like art. Which was its own politics then. But Dohi's resemble, recall unplaceable things, which is our politics now. Resemblance was dirty back then, we wanted purity in forms, because clouded abstraction led to impure thoughts. Why do we desire allusive formalism now? Fecteau, Baghramian, Balema, Nagle, et al. Is still a latent surrealism? The shifting space of ambiguous "clouds" saying that one looks like a rabbit but never knowing it.

See too: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Lucy Bull at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2)

Past: Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects

...like jewelry brazed from trash. ...something so fungal about them, lichens atop autonomous crust. ... feel fragile, like cripple ducklings we wish to care for because they can actually be wounded.

read full: Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

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Lewitt seems to invent covers for books, images that contain a promise, alluding to some deeper richer story. Instead we get a press release. The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too. Not a book by its cover and all that.


see too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Kim Gordon at 303

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At a certain point you can cash in the cred you've made by pressing tokens of it. Baseball cards of your occasionally-sublimated visage. For the collector. This show isn't about surveillance or the "intimacy surreptitiously undermined by insidious, unseen forces", unless maybe about the fact that Gordon is famous and feels like people are constantly sticking a camera in her face. Where a gathering could actually feel like surveillance. Who would acoustically render Wonderwall there? Gordon has a different level of surveillance than the rest; which is why we're here. Which is why there's a campfire of monitors in the middle to remember why we are here. The most interesting works are the ceramics, in which we watch someone famous be sort of middling and naive at something, making them human sculptures. They're the only things not cool, cold and deflecting.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Modern Art hosting Team Gallery

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We call this "his exploration of the dynamics of intimacy." But here's the deal, this nudity rarely feels intimate; it is awkward, stiff, bodies look uncomfortable trying to bend a composition. The bodies work for the camera who is the master to be satiated. Which explains their machine-like affection. It's a more Hans-Breder-like photographic attitude, any sympathetic Tillmans-esque is fractured, the body formalized, turned to abstraction, which is a gore, a machine of equivocation, skin becomes fingerprinted glass becomes magazine flesh cut and pasted.  This is ostensibly fun but play and its dalliance gets close to frivolousness, becomes dangerous when you are machine shredding bodies.


See too: “Automatic Door” (Mark McKnight) at Park View / Paul Soto

Past: Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document

"It's why so many photographers are want to document the youth, embodiment of the photograph's eternal nubility as we all die...
"...flaunting the camera as possessor, the machine which embeds the photographic capture as loss, everything moving away from the machine indexing time ... These people, these bodies, moved away from this moment and its crux the camera ... It's horribly romantic but it's true, time intransigently on, surely stupid to point out, but painful to see every-time we see it ....  see you then."


Read Full: Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document

Hadi Fallahpisheh at CENTRAL FINE

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Ah the virtualization of our white space made manifest with a blown out shutter. Letting the light in. That vertigo you feel when the floor falls out, little rooms traded for infinite white void, us floating. This is the world Fallahpisheh draws in photographically, would be the read here. But this is the world we all draw in, this is our world, this is just more literal.