Alex Mackin Dolan at David Lewis

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CAWD has been talking about the interfacization of painting since at least 2016. 

the iconization of content. The practice of stylization...  Information is converted to its image then compositionalized. But that doesn't nerf it. The interface is strong, it causes our reading which we cannot prevent. Icons are meaning even when they don't. and we are like hypnotized. We are made to read space, and here sign systems converted to labyrinth make puzzling. [The fount of art]

Alex Mackin Dolan's had been a sort of Bickerton excess of this until now literalizing it. We put quarters of our attention into painting- this is a wishing well for meaning. Here the pay off is content, and that bright shiny orb of an interior payoff. This is how painting is like gambling. 

see too: Interface

Todd Gray at David Lewis

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Land acknowledgements become the prayer before meal. An expression of gratitude, humility. Our original sin. God is replaced with another adjudicating sin. Forgives the mechanized reaping from an overseeing eye, guilt. (The material substrate underpinning increasingly abstracted.) There exists no similar expression for houses built by slaves, the wealth extracted from under the feet of dominated peoples. Though Armand White did call out 12 Years a Slave for allowing white people to self-congratulate for feeling aghast at slavery. Art becomes a similar guilt release valve, an acknowledgment as prayer, talisman, a badge to prove we thought about it, and found ourselves humbled in East Hampton.

Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

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It's hard to be a performance artist. And Kasper's last Lewis exhibition so cleverly inverted the artist-is-present ethos instead staging the viewer as a humming presence awkwardly avoiding the pratfall spotlighting in the artist's absence. But now, as common, the objects seem awaiting their activation, the remains of the artist, like ashtrays or souvenirs, artists leave both.


See too: Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

Charles Mayton at David Lewis

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Mayton's tooling around inside painting's molding corpse has gone on way longer that most, way further than necrophilia - while others have cleaned their pallets of its thick blood in exchange for the clean tools of airbrushes, rendering, and illustrative blending - Mayton has tent-poled the corpse, setting up shop in its really-getting-old flesh. A lot of this was predicted by Polke and mocked by Kippenburger even before it had turned but it's Mayton's stubborn continuation of the corpse-fuckery that manifests whatever interest might lay here, still itemizing black organs turned to mush from already several decades of autopsy in hopes of finding a new clue. Like long ago the host asked the guests to leave but one person's commitment to the party long since past you stay for just to see if anything might come of it, and everyone waiting and everyone else screaming please leave, please stop.

Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

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It's not a stretch to think this installation as turning the tables on her WhiBi installation, the endurothon live-in where everyone gawked at her, the object viewed, inverted to set instead the viewer on heavily amplified stage, a sort of DIY version of Abramovic's spectaculars less concerned with (ostensible) spiritual risk of, like, all encompassing ego death in another's gaze and more just like the day to day drudgery of moving a lumpy sweating thing through space along with stacks of records and books and your like metaphorical underwear for all to see, there was, afterall, some Camus in her belongings did you see? I think the moral here is that it's hard to be looked at but easy to decide to be looked at. There's some saleable objects on the backwall.