Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

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The PR's meter relates them to sun - "Sunshine made physical" - and not that dark shameful interior - the abyssal logs we pass like intestinal ropes, attaching us our immanence. The difference between what something is and what something represents. They are but sticks. Sunshine made physical. But oiled with elbow grease. Which makes them sensitive. Opens pores for interpretation. The break in between what something is and what something suggests: a function, poetic fissure. Tea leaves, turds, or sticks, when placed against porcelain, it's open. Suggestive and, more importantly, moistened.

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

Whitney Claflin at Bodega

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tangential painting circling but never quite anchoring, stylistically. The goopy dripstractions are the best we could call a Claflin style/theme, but everything else fighting to rebut this signatory. This is the tangential theme, non-linear moves, a sort of Richard Aldrich befuddlement of the terms of painting, a genre which is like alt-rock, an alt to painting that doesn't say no to dad so much as use lipstick to differentiate itself as alternative. 

See too: Richard Aldrich

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

Doris Guo at Bodega

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"mementos of that sentimentally thick effect of decor working socially called 'ambience.' Bottled atmosphere ferments..."

Sculpture as an image, like Mander's Nocturnal Garden Scene (who make Louise Nevelson seem underrated), beneath Spoerri's table settings, the underneath, the legs become the portal, cavern, the place we spent time as children, under what holds the adult's Morandis, in the nocturnes, in the maw, against mother's legs clutched, we found worlds in forts constructed, in makeshift boxes, a certain heat to the darkness. We're not really allowed under the tables anymore, so of course the magic trip stops halfway.
Surrealism sure, but striking.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Orion Martin at Bodega

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the roughly two inches of depth that Martin allows as pans for the sifting of images, cultural gold, and perhaps owing to Beckman's claustro-orgies, updating that era's expressionism is for this one's iPhone sheen, both's cultural unconscious brought up and pressed against the glass for our peering zoological efforts. The "shreds of childhood half-memories made manifest, and fleshed out with so much lurid detail that it feels confrontational" with the images we have internally seared into us, cultural echoes rattling around inside your head's quiet moments occasionally materializing from the noise of your brain a jingle from 30 years ago. What we are forced to carry and not sure exactly what the surrealists were planning as the point of irrupting the subconscious onto the page when it seems to be a lot like dredging some kind of horrible cultural sewer pipe and we cramming snakes into it.


See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

“In Vitro” at Bodega

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This is an interesting exhibition documentation choice: the light from the street overpowers the gallery's, which, generally, we avoid. The gallery's lighting should be all encompasing, powerful, a scour to impurities. That this exhibition takes as its theme the shop window makes the reversal make sense, the gallery becomes a sort of inverse shop window itself. Which it always was. The fishtank of the street. But it's an interesting way of framing object which take the commodic display as their penchant. The Musee d'Orsay lights paintings with square spots fit to the paintings to make them appear as if the paintings themselves emit the light. It's important to know from where your light come.

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

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Trinkets, toys, and souvenirs, takeaway objects of little use but hold significance. The objects are total surface, tchotchkes are transactional objects made for the transference of the buyer's desire. The souvenir acts as a placeholder for tourists urge and must communicate this through look. The erotics of style, of desire, likely some vestigial expression of our sexual selection's wiring, which is why so many of them are cute. The distance from art is short, but a false canyon between.

The PR essay is good.

Sarah Ortmeyer at Bodega

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Taking Ruff's indictment against photographic representation, Ortmeyer's opposes the anonymous objects of Ruff's DMV photographics with a more mythologic subject, a cultural signifier to whom our attraction is unbounded, orbiting a celestial beauty, a man of so much weight that his image begins to accrete its own reality shell, Beckham the cultural image extended so that we do know "him," the satin-soft shell casing of his unbirthed self, Beckham the silky hard image vs the soft subject inside.


See too : On Kawara at the Guggenheim , Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K.

“Lands’ End” at Bodega

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Bodega operating cooly for 5 years now and this the first CAD approved, one conspiratorially wonders if it’s with newfound Pryde.

The uncanny and abjection, and the various forms of it, from the saccharine of overripeness to detritus sticky resin stuck and mannequin wire children in floatsafe fashions, to the cold necrotic design of corporate cooperative, to place the mess against the continuing prophylacticizing of the world behind rubber corners, and all the seediness within it. A trending antagonism against clean whiteness, the final form of punk will be something with disgust no one wants at all.

David Duard at Johan Berggren , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway