Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

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You will spend 3/4 of your press release explaining this object, an artifact precipitated from global anxieties. The story is interesting, succinctly narrativizing global transition's stranger expression as as a terse plot. The story almost a retooling of the standard Disney prince/princess narrative, the pauper/prince transforming his embattled town to gold tech industry; the coffin carpenter saws himself into manufacturing mogul. Storytelling magic, installing the lens to view the object as new. An object once prized for inexpense (rivaling ikea!), it now has value for the story it contains like a totem. 3/4 of reviewer's wordcount will be recounting the incantation to install the program in their readers. To see this global precipitate for our study, under new lights, placing lights in it, illuminating it, live cameras to portray it from a new and multiple angles and place within it a potion of "wood, ink on rice paper, single-channel video (7:00 mins, looped), plastic bundles containing: inflatable dolphins, security blankets, dried mushrooms, bath mat, bucket, rice noodles, dried fish maw, poncho, lotus leaves, candied winter melon, aluminum platter, 360-degree panoramic WIFI camera light bulbs" - fish bladders take on the flavor of the soup they are in - to activate "artistry," and to its benefit 4 questions end it, directly asked in the PR like a book club edition's questionnaires for sparking conversation, refreshing in its directness, and us looking to find answers searching at all the beauty of totem poles.



See too: Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The frame had once aggrandized its painting haloed, a gilded crown of thorns, calcifying its divine radiance. Here a painting frames to single out, brushwork to excise from the multitudes, make singular, uniquification, a continually more common process of art for objects that too easily reproduce unchecked; the frame becomes the mechanism to restrain an object from free agency, shackling it to an owner, a place, a home, no digital viewing offered. That the effort enacting such scarcity is dumb matters none, it might as well be.


See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Michele Abeles at 47 Canal

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Signs distressed like denim, "suggesting the works as literal vortexes into which you might be pulled" "Call them pictures generation 2.0" the symbols vita-mixed into oblivion, like David Salle amphetamined on Kelley Walker for the attention deficit. And today the Nytimes posts an article about decision fatigue, the overabundance of information, in which people at malls faced with so much choice cognitively exhaust and the brain, in crisis, in attempt to manage resources, begins to decide either impulsively or not at all, purchasing unrestrainedly or leaving with nothing. So whether you feel tired of these or want to purchase one probably has something to do with that.


See too: CAWD on Desensitization, Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, Rachel Rose at High Art

Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The directness of its depiction is satisfying like a sign painter's numbers, a dumbness relieving against the muddled intentions of more artistic means. Like late Guston's plodding brush making hamfistedly evident its recording of painting, Shimizu's brushwork is the bones conjuring the apparition, the image's appearance, to be there incredibly plain: a plush otter holding a starfish. Their almost autistic commitment to the deadpan delivery of depiction pityably endearing.


Past: Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

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Uoo is fashionable, and that used to be an insult. Fashion is means for representation. Fashionable would mean representation of a moment- pejoratively implied that the moment is fleeting. Speculative-fictions - Sci-Fi - fashion, perhaps misguidedly, attempt projections of futures to distend its transience by destroying its moment. The trendbook's fashion is always fleeting but, at their best, allow new representations, if only for a time. Anyway, Uoo's "politics of luxury" - like many today - is for a fashion without camp, that the glitz doesn't necessarily have to be artifice, that we can be rich.

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

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Haegue Yang’s early blinds - prior to the later shopping-spree installationism - interspersed heaters, smells and videos of airport lounges within its venetian mazes to create metonymnic sites for the then-still analog fracturing of space (it was 2007 when jet-setting was still the only way to fly) was relevant to globalizing artworld. Yang's spaces disfigured unconscious visual ordering of space and inserted their own artificial senses for it. The video monitors depiction of circulation’s non-sites became ironic respite from the disorder, but in the banality becoming no escape at all. Of course that all now looks nostalgic, superseded by the all-powered exchange of monitor-theater.
And so here the lights turn low and the curtain drawn around all-interior personal theaters, locked in to Bacta tanks of network refresh in a Sturtevant spin, fleeing videos in which attention cannot be directed-to but merely mis-directed by whirli-wig visions, matching the press release's dizziness of everywhere-nowhere artist romance, refreshing art’s nauseating self-sentimentalization.

BFFA3AE at 47 Canal



Internet artists finally real-world exhibiting is always so literal. AIDS 3-D’s actualization of a gif in sculpture sans lossy nostalgia. or Arcangel’s ability to make the literalness ham-fisted fun. Here a David Robbins Concrete Comedy but rather more making-fun-of than funny. Remains of Birthday balloons for Bruce Nauman hallway. Yuk, Yuk. A teenage bedroom-cum-office of all the internets embarrassments. Yuk, Yuk. The non-vocals of pop-segue literalized: Na,na,na ×12. Yuk, Yuk. Pointing out the foibles of the never-meant-to-be-taken-seriously-anyway has never been a winning game. The naive vernacular of digital natives is what endears us to the internet, no one is asking to “foist an infantilizing rationality on all ‘Internet art.’” Its remaining irrational that's hardest. A requiem for remembering when this used to be fun.