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

Past: Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

" ...abstraction's referential amorphousness: a resemblance that, like inkblots, adapt to the viewer they appear to. Apparition as innuendo. Do you see the sunglassed DJ's hi-top fade? do you see a booty shaking, a wailing baby, or a pig outdoors at night through a molar keyhole..."

Read full: Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

Julian Irlinger at Thomas Schulte

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Butterflies pinned will always be beautiful.  Taxonomy's segmenting provides the world under glass, alien from itself. Taxidermy the world. It'll embalm itself eventually won't it. So it'd be nice if we could organize it before then. Our anthropology always only reflects the norms of the diggers.

Past: Jef Geys at Essex Street

"...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

Sue Tompkins at The Modern Institute

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The painting's ineptness could almost be salved with reminders of Tompkin's enjoyably askew performances, the hollow echoes of paintings like. Today everyone verbs the noun. "Performs Painting" "Investigates Painting." And Painting saved by performance has become a trope. At least these have Polaroids as appendages to make them kind of do a jig.


See too:  Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley