Win McCarthy at Atlantis

(link)

As updates on Kelley's arenas, tchotchkes on blankets, these add a box. It's a more literal symbol of repression that Kelley's, an artist with a lifelong interest in cultural repression, had left as perfume. These are like Brad Pitt crying "What's in the box?" The PR narration's spells it out ominously: "we tend to have to wait to find out what’s lying beneath" like a Kevin Spacey line. What's latent in a culture? And it's again literal, turns out the clown was a pedophile. A joke we've heard before.

Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis

(FF, Atlantis)

Of the kids today raised on cartoons and adopting surrealism, Noel's slightness is a psychic mess, more pollution than collage, tinged with repression. The shadow of a plane is the specter haunting here, but throughout is an "offness" that is more motion sickness than fear. Like Gertrude Abercrombie, or Goodnight Moon, an unease in desolate scenes in omnipresent sourceless light. Or Ken Price's drawings, his own harsh light of LA, ominous in shadows looking like oil, a lack of light which threatened to become physical thing, ink, creep from the cracks, precipitate from the air, cover everything. Noel's light too, toxic, the haze as permanent fixture, everything feeling smogged, poisoned. Pollution as repression, spectacular sunsets, and black oil beneath feet. The 9/11 in everyone's bedroom.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Michael E. Smith at Atlantis

(link)

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 like 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

Marie Angeletti at Atlantis

(link)

exacerbating all the annoyances of images today, Angeletti's are always claustrophobically opaque, too close, dim. Not quite sure Angeletti has ever shown in a completely lit space, and the once maybe had had lots of photos of rotational laser lighting, the sort of whirliwig mimicking the driftlessness of her own floating so contextless unanchored. There's an interest in the roving light. Without didactic we see Three Seascapes, possibly, but in another a didactic for painting we cannot see. Herbert saw it early: "If pre-existing, these photographs meant one thing in a catalogue, museum or wherever, and now they signify something else or, intrinsically, nothing at all: detached, rivulets in a larger directional flow. ‘Thanks, Internet,’ such work murmurs." 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, our cognition is molested by daily could make an art practice mirroring such seem a brutal finger but at some point we have to be trained for this, we could attempt to make sense of, it all, if we wanted to start lifting.

Martin Soto Climent at Atlantis

(link)

The gesture given frame, cradle for its image, able to be sent, transacted. The clear delineation of artistic parameters allow fungibility. Soto Climent's sensitives haven't always been so packaged. The packaging lends a sentimentality, a hope for stasis, permanence, removed from the chaotic world into an order, like butterflies pinned to boards, like a new gallery seemingly without website finding itself well represented on white backdrops.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova