Past : Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read, Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich


"...apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies, big black table eyes. There is too many things to say about these things, looking like too much, their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility in its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential..."



Click: Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read, Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich

Orion Martin at Bodega

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the roughly two inches of depth that Martin allows as pans for the sifting of images, cultural gold, and perhaps owing to Beckman's claustro-orgies, updating that era's expressionism is for this one's iPhone sheen, both's cultural unconscious brought up and pressed against the glass for our peering zoological efforts. The "shreds of childhood half-memories made manifest, and fleshed out with so much lurid detail that it feels confrontational" with the images we have internally seared into us, cultural echoes rattling around inside your head's quiet moments occasionally materializing from the noise of your brain a jingle from 30 years ago. What we are forced to carry and not sure exactly what the surrealists were planning as the point of irrupting the subconscious onto the page when it seems to be a lot like dredging some kind of horrible cultural sewer pipe and we cramming snakes into it.


See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, its a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Past: B. Wurtz at Lulu

"The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire, a pubescent attire, pimples and athletics, is here given an absurdly fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course."


B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien

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"deploys her fragmented gestures in the service of a greater alchemy," chipping away at the artistic monument, further granularized to finer and finer pocks and us finally all staring at noise like a church for sensitivity training - commanded to the virtue of noticing.  Like if you removed all the signs from the world asserting "scenic view ahead." As if we could consider it all so. There is no thing to see, no "main thing." Just a forest and trying see every tree for it, any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art.


see too: Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society

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but different from minimalism in their contaminating themselves in faint veils of cultural signifiers. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power.  "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation," They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition replaced with mystery, instead all the doohickies and flimflams and us wondering why we expected it to begin with. The flux capacitor must only look like the expectations a public has for such an object.


See too: Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Past: Richard Rezac

"And today we are more than acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us, so much so that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us..."



Click: Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi