Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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have oft nightmares of the things that run underneath the earth. Wasn't that a major plot point of  Ghostbusters? Nightmares manifested as physical slime, the collective bad vibes of a city?  gives image to what we all feel as the undercurrents of sociality, culture, we say the city was "electric" but when the mood goes sour its feels like beneath the faces of everyone pumps black bile. 20th century surrealism seemed too preoccupied with the mythos of artistic genius, and everyone's paintings explored personal psyche which led to Hollywood giving more spectacular manifestations of cultural rather personal psyche. Isn't there a movie where Tom Hanks is almost drown in his suburban basement by a pipe pumping it full of shit? Or is this another nightmare. Artists have a whole history digging holes - outdoors, in studio, in gallery, in life - but one would like for a genealogy of pipes. Nightmare pipes, a genre.


see too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Past: Caroline Mesquita at T293

"mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, [...] the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality"


full: Caroline Mesquita at T293

Life Sport at Point Chaud

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Art is a capitalistic hustle despite whatever clung to beliefs of any spiritual separation from economic domination. Spiritual practices of artists not working in a factory. And a lot of artists work in factories of other artists. (Interesting turn of events if workers seized the means of production from their CEO artists. How many art practices have devolved into studio assistant performing a rendition of Weekend at Bernie’s with their long dead-inside artists?) But so until all workers are about rise up, it would seem under the current conditions, not only capital but situations in which “money for the arts” appears to go to those willing to reproduce the previous generation in younger blood, that some forms of collectivization - or pure entrepreneurial endeavors - would spring up. It would hopefully raise questions of “who is allowed to speak” and the artworld would actually register this. But it won’t. You either survive or you don’t. If you produce some magic in that, we might respect you.

Zoe Nelson at JDJ

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With gallery decentralization away from artcenters in an age of ever more omnipresent digital panopticons - foot traffic obsolescence, warehousing in cheaper real estate, and by appointments only - the white cube and its Matrix-like virtual space will perhaps become redundant to this physical de-locale, a fear of vertigo of a white space sent into hyperspace the gallery-space will need to self-locate, architecture will appear as a watermark to keep one foot on the ground avoiding the spins tumbling through non-space.

Amanda Ross-Ho at Mary Mary

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What a good cruel show. There’s more photos on Mary Mary’s website. Click and drag virtual to our emotional scales, our pain. 10. Until the walls are howling. Size is a cruelty, we don’t want our more fragile moments blown up on walls. Child burn units developed these, for children pre language, to describe their pain as burned children, white rooms of red. Is there anything more unimaginable than this?  As a means of exchange we turn emotion into a signifier, turn it into plastic information, capable of all sorts of manipulation. “A universal metric to measure human suffering” Your pain is universal, equivocal, exchangeable for the pain of others. This is the best we could come up with to communicate with red children. The world is still primitive, its virtualization even more so. We all fear technology but not its precursors. (like)

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Past: Amanda Ross-Ho

Past: Amanda Ross-Ho

"By sheer determination of size it virtualizes space, collapsing distance between you and it"
"no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter, forcing themselves upon you, bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size. [...] The shifts in scale reassert their indifference towards your own. [...] a cold aggressive plasticity of its information."
"Like the masks central to this exhibition, human emotion is traded for its systematic expression"
"Mental buggery of signification replacing the consensualness of sight."


Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

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The apparition we all throw guesses like darts towards. Knowledge that's predicated on the firming up of agreement, history a handshake between historians. And in this way the amorphous is not an agreeable substance to a culture that would like to make everything fungible, easily transactable. Instead here see things that reveal only us, an elephant we're all hiding in our own personal rooms under big sheets. Ambiguousness is hot right now, the abstractionists with their gluttonous anthropomorphics, the kids with their balloon swollen cartoons, the sculptors with their lumpy things. The ambiguity exemplar of our world's distrust. Who knows who is actually the man behind the curtain.


See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Alice Tippit at Night Club