Sam Falls at 303 Gallery

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The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s ability to create souvenirs of experience you didn't have is premised on some vestigial trait  of conceptual that may never have existed. I.e. does On Kawara painting "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger toward it.  Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? The signifier does not actually contain its signified, I thought we understood that. No cares seems to care where the canvas is wove, where the pigment is made; no we only care for the image which ostensibly means something, stupidly. Both "index" their world, other artists.

Stan VanDerBeek at DOCUMENT

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A photo of a projector. Two photos actually, of 19. While a video is provided, the photos are an assertion of your missing something, even of the object we usually ignore. An object photographed as totem to the distance between you and what you clicked to see.

Past: Pope.L

"but the joke dissipates and the punchline, lost, disperses the energy of its expectation to an audience as nervous flatness. This type of joke flips the roles, the performer now audience to their reaction, making the best of such jokes just complex enough to contain within the possibility of real punchline hidden and thus doubt, a heightened consciousness of where exactly it lay, the blankness of its meaning a projectable void that you can stand on many sides of..."

Click for full: Pope.L at What Pipeline, William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Jasper Marsalis at Svetlana

(http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2018/10/jasper-marsalis-at-svetlana/)

A sort of scuzz painting. Skins like cigarettes clinging Guston lips. Brush strokes congealed. Drawing that heals like a scab. We love paint, not painting, and the trick is to get the paint on the canvas without the absurdity of "painting" and the brushstrokes that denote it, and so Marsalis seems to paint it with sticks, mold it like Kristevan flesh, like detritus, like eye goo.

See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St

Past: Sam Anderson at Rowhouse Project

"There is rarely an object of Anderson's we don't look down at, that you don't watch where you step, a presentation whose, like early Wilkes or Aran's tables, dust settled marks this instance and foreboding its wind. A little dog rolling over exposing belly's soft pink skin veiling easily destroyed guts." There is a fragility.



Click for full: Sam Anderson at Rowhouse Project

Channa Horwitz at Ghebaly Gallery

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It's maybe treating the arbitrary with such taut thin lines, with laborious specificity to chart chance - "aleatory openness" - in cryptography the sampling of physical phenomena is required for true random number generation. Noise. Which are charted in webs of delicacy. That information look. Corrections in the margins underscoring, by acknowledging the flaws pointing towards, the ideal they aspire to, that there even is an ideal, however far from it, even if irrational.

Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

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A google search says no one has used to word tumor in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd, his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of weird malignant lumps, red dots, growths on institution and inflated with resin crusts. Teratomas are a specific type of tumor composed of tissues not normally present at the site, the classic hair and teeth twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot Smith's more "bodily" objects. Of growths without cause, find a potato in our eye, a DNA corruption, the "categorically promiscuous" things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt, so that black tar is becoming-blood, and knees ground becoming-asphalt. You can move between categories, your body could become alligator skin, claws inside you.


Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry