Past: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho

"directly asked in the PR like a book club edition's questionnaires for sparking conversation and us looking to find answers, searching at all the beauty of totem poles."

Read full:

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at CCS Bard

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (2)

Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (1)

Gili Tal at Cabinet

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the question of what outside your window could be less interesting than this art. You draw the shade on the world just to be mocked by this, a curtain that won't let you escape the banality. If the photos are by no means good, would it not be fault of the world they depict? It is your city that is ugly, and you should be forced to buy one of these as reminder that your castle not separate from your city. This mindset allowed for the suburbs, its devolution into ugliness; people moved in personalized containers, personal vehicles in trajectories to their big boxes sheltered, their home, their work, moved in submarines of personalized climate. Curtains are a weak force against the world as these posit perhaps someday someone will invent something to break glass, and the world will flood in.


Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque settings; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to the Southern Gothic tradition, Modern Gothic is uniquely rooted in contemporary Capitalism's tensions and aberrations. During the 21st century, the everywhere-nowhere setting of today's post-industrial cities became “the principal region of Modern Gothic” in art. The Modern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the progressive, collectivized City rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: capitalism, class, and patriarchy. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history. Because of its dark and everyday subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level.


Modern Gothic: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Past: Gili Tal at Jenny’s

"The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers, a lightness mimicking advertising's own getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation..."

read full: Gili Tal at Jenny’s

Perhaps the worst of art is paying attention to artists circulating on, I guess, someone's dollar as an update to the bohemian-chic lifestyle we've been culturally fed as the artist's way now updated with easy first class tickets and diaspora of art centers all needing to be curated and shown the same art, the same names and everyone playing along at home from their TV screens which broadcasts the fantasies of their bohemia back at them.


See too: Ian Rosen at The Finley, Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite, 186f Kepler at Contemporary Art Daily
"Clifton Palace," “Pho Viet Huong” "Vzszhhzz," "Astro 5," and "Tes Yeux" at 186f Kepler

Past: 186f Kepler

"2015, 186f Kepler releases press stating the liquidation of informational categories as more closely resembling the aqueous system of art, and it’s true, the Field of Cultural Production now looks less like the rigid markets of symbolic goods and more like social systems of pedigree in which, as predicted by Deleuze, the postscript on society’s controls turns institutional interiors into dispersed system of self-policing and production, in which there no longer is an outside to market, your existence becomes the system of circulation for circles and scenes, seeking the endlessly theorized “network” of social capital. And here having CAD as your sandbox to immediately sediment your activity with visibility, you can do as little or much as desired, with enough accredited names attached you’ve got CAD to market your dispersion for you, becoming “of interest” simply by having been listed. 186f Kepler does in fact mirror and perform the social mechanism in which liquidation isn’t so much “escape” as marketing..."

Read full: 186f Kepler at Contemporary Art Daily
Read full: "Clifton Palace," “Pho Viet Huong” "Vzszhhzz," "Astro 5," and "Tes Yeux" at 186f Kepler

Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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the more vulgar excesses of Humphries's paint always excused by its obliviousness to the demands of "making a painting." Humphries's almost without-composition but still composed, paintings like an accident, car or bed sheet. And these are readymade, the previous paintings reduxed with the latest deployment: ASCII printing. And so Humphries' drip, brushstroke, mark, neither expressive nor quotational of expression, paint is instead already perfectly dumb. This separates them from the hordes of zombies: no search for brains. Instead the cannibal-without-purpose seems pleasant after so many decades of painting's conceptual juicing. Like Richter whose painting exists in the netherworld of a stupid transcendence, instead just give us what we want, paint, flesh, dumbly.


see too: Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

Past: Henning Bohl

"Bohl is the indeterminate horror that knot guy fears."
as quoted in full the PR here


Past: Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther