Michael Queenland at Maureen Paley

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Pre compress our trash into the decorative fossils it will become? Litter absorbed into the earth that on geologic scales become liquids, so our landfills are like slow smoothies. Someday someone assess our ruins as beautiful fossils.


Trash: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

Past: Michaela Eichwald

"make true atrociousness palatable, fecal umbers into gastro-figuratives of the stomach churning they induce..."" poured onto pleather paint flourishes implication: painters are smearing their own oily expelleds.  Like graffiti's intestinal signatures defecating their authorial. Looking at art doesn't work if you have to take a piss, its magic is ruined by a heavy bag, so that when you try conceptualize art with your head you're still reminded of your bowel held waste, the brown rope tethering us to earth that Eichwald seems to consistently paint."


Click for full: Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe, Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley

Past: Jutta Koether

"but whereas for today’s puzzle painting exists as a kind of confounding delay of symbol's comprehension, Koether's over-saturation never a maze but a hyperlink version..."

"what you're looking at isn't what you're looking at: what you're looking at is cultural baggage, garbage piling your sentience. It floating to the surface like diapers, the noise of signal and symbols. You can't see purely, you are clogged with reference."

Click here for full Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

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"...made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist's hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist's hands are everywhere. [...] the tactile memory of garcia's hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can't touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?"

a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass. Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Past: Joshua Abelow

"The wider artworld came to know Abelow through his Art Blog which -coming to prominence against the sterile facade of CAD's hegemony - felt human, resistant, and no-qualms subjective key to a very specific NY scene, felt warm in reestablishing the local against the global, like grocery co-op charm to Walmart's efficiency. It felt NY again. And as interest increased for those looking for the freshest produce Abelow became, if a not a ringleader, then a purveyor of visibility, a figure of some small access in a scene, that everyone knew, all the while and for like ten years before making scruffy hamhanded paintings that purviewed the doubt of the painter, the doubt morphing over many years, the paintings changing over the course of Abelow's character development from unknown, from entendres of suicide ("HANG ME") to flat laughter ("HARHAR") and as the painter character grew to show himself, to paintings of a man running full speed with his erection before him, to today that same man cloaked in the facade of a powerful witch, and all lovely abstractions along the way, still running."

D’Ette Nogle at Bodega

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manifesting pedagogy and social reproduction in object form was never going to be exactly "fun," and the soft-authority is deployed with a humor so dry as to almost be nonexistent (its own form of comedy) and even when the stand-up exists it is deprecated to near loss, fury, all but calling the whole thing, whole project, the teacher that Nogle is as "fucking losers." (admission-of is repeatedly the point). Assessment and authority and its role in social-reproduction is as an aesthetic as much as anything and one that Nogle has for some time now enjoyed erecting in art spaces. (It seems the funnier stuff goes to storage.) And Nogle's interest in this loveably unfun thing we call bureaucracy* seems to be for its hairy, ensnaring and otherwise tangly qualities. Enjoyment seems less important than the slowly painting and then identifying one's hands, yours and hers, with a faint perfume of red, so that "you're going to regret clapping in the end." But reproducing it in you, teaching.

*conceptual art has always had some sort of quasi-love affair with bureaucracy, legalese, instructions, and always pressing "expression" through this grate of whatever schematics. Nogle, a grade school teacher and graduate of Mary Kelly's UCLA program (a program supposedly DEEP into Lacanian psychoanalysis) and who herself, Kelly, had her own malignant-bodily comedy-spoof on conceptualism. And so it's no surprise that Nogle's is obviously in the grand lineage birthing some demon form of bureaucratic "socially-adjusted" conceptual art, forcing it to speak through the lenses of current dominant forms of socially "tuned behavior." 


Pregnant bureaucracy: Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton

Mathew Cerletty at STANDARD (OSLO)

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It's like the closer it is to reproducing its sign that maybe reality starts to panic. Not necessarily the platonic forms, but, like, maybe. Painting feeling like objects smoothing into their icons, symbols, some sort of shorthand for reality which isn't it.
Appropriation by means of really really close, technical, representation. Which, Sturtevantily, negates it.