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Luz Carabaño at Hoffman Donahue

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You know how the gentle but complex shapes in worn pastels of used bars of soap are kind of always beautiful? Well imagine those shapes on your porcelain white, you looking down into them, and there a kind of seeing pool, a bar of soap screening faded and out-of-focus vintage film reels. Things you remember and fuzzy. Yeah kinda like that. Your ability to believe in this will mark your reception to. They are but soap, and that's important. 

Jiang Cheng at Tara Downs

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The 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump. We're inordinately cruel to ourselves.

You can paint a face like a sunset. It will let you. Rearrange eyes, nose, mouth - a surgeon from hell, Picasso. Tyrannically bend people for aesthetics. These seem somehow more tender. Maybe its the close cropping, which take serious the surface, flesh, rather than rearranging a Mr. Potato Head. (Deleuze famously remarking that Bacon didn't paint faces but heads, meat.) Maybe it's this painting a face, painting it like a Monet, a low-irony too-serious painting for today, implying a minimum of self care. Artists finally part of the beauty industry, these look like it. Who doesn't want to look like a water lily?

Marie Angeletti at Ishikawa House

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Nauman's own nighttime video mapping of the studio (Fat Chance John Cage) became, against all odds, enjoyable. (How the stupidest idea in the world actualized as zen fun the most Nauman thing in the world.) Live-streaming a studio across continents/timezones sets up a similar potentiality - it's live! -but not knowing it will. An artwork with potential energy, all edging, audience set to wait for any small climax. No guarantees. In the meantime it's a studio displaced, potential artworks transmitted virtually to potential ends, metaphors for our modern age write themselves, a machine set to run, gesticulate, no guarantees for reward, just finding hope in darkness, Prisoner's Cinema, Nauman, it writes itself.

See too: ...because the work does feel like the internet, forced with lips glued to feed, like we all are. You can assemble the parts to de-crimescene what's on display here, or wait for the another writer to mutate to docent, to explain, but that'd be beside the point to be at a loss shuffling through image that Angeletti seems determined to maintain in limbo, contextless. The breadth of Angeletti's work looks like a google image search for a long string of arbitrary numbers, irrational, an array of the world's arranged by a search term we cannot see, which, in an era of almost total fuck-all of contextless images...

Meredith James at Marinaro

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We've professed our love for Cletus Johnson, for the illuminated entrance, a threshold all facade. So yes, of course, these. Film screen projection, places for mental exit.  Like Masaccio's The Holy Trinity, pictorial painting was a virtual place you could enter. We forget this, so we build models now to remind us what was so obvious then. You can enter painting.

See too: So the couch becomes the projection screen for us, the surveillance into us, like looking back asking the question: "Before our we uploaded to the cloud what were we?" back through the screen to see reality - or its cave - through the remains.

Bagus Pandega at Swiss Institute

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Is there a history of the myth of mad scientist? How it led from Frankenstein to Flux Capacitors to Elon Musk's share price? We buy into big air quotes "science" somehow, eternally, this belief in the lab, in eccentrics tinkering. Think: computer chips we don't understand powering black boxes we can't get inside underpinning markets' growth we can't predict. But it is growing, against all speculation, growth. So hook a plant to wires, make the mushroom sing. It doesn't even need to get results, the art is getting believe to believe in your company, believe in something more, art, Elon. This is where tech-bros, art, and the new age coincide, gesticulation of tropes conjuring a higher plane?


See too: Youtube is full of mushrooms making music. Electrode strapped fungi pulsing midi machines. One mushroom plays the keyboard. If only the forest floor could speak. Remember when you could buy CDs of whale sounds? The new age reverberates. Here deforested wood planks are let to scream their political messaging. We don't know what they actually say, and that's important to art, which has been absolved the responsibility. The highest order of art is gesticulation. A charade. A game played by two teams, where one member acts out a word, phrase, or title in pantomime (without speaking) for their own team to guess.

We are delighted. For we knew we were the light.

In terms of image, we live after the flood. Photography's success in the digital era reproduced its own extinction: overpopulation in digital shoeboxes, useless. Post deluge, visibility is no longer determined by the image but by apparatus that can concentrate attention - make visible. In the sense that algorithms and the attention economy are able to package its visibility into a frame, they are doing their own picture-making. Photography is superseded, the new apparatus of picture-making is an algorithm of attention. Engagement rate drives the shutter on a moment. 

Go look at how primitive our images used to look, Jessica Stockholder at Jay Gorney Modern Art; it's is practically Stonehenge. This is all to say, we need more pictures of the past, and maybe this is the way to take them. Perhaps the 90s will have taken place again.

See too: We scroll images of images. Our capacities for dealing, for dealing with, making sense, of them erodes as the sheer quantity of information we are met with on the eponymous daily. They flow against whatever wishes for a control to the spigot, they'll be more tomorrow. We begin to triage our incoming information; our form of relation moves from a relation of understanding to one of recognition, able to name something, our conversations formed around the little opinions we've manifested as stopgap standing in for control, CAWD.

In the beginning, there was darkness, formless and empty over the surface of the deep, hovering over the waters, and Forrest said let there be Contemporary Art Daily and there was. And Forrest saw that Contemporary Art Daily was good, and separated those exhibitions from the limelight and the darkness. And Contemporary Art Daily called its light "of contemporary relevance" and the darkness "not worthy of publication."