Robert Lostutter at Derek Eller Gallery

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The blockbuster Chicago Imagist retrospective we need is overdue, might be ten years too late at this point. The movements today which took so much from it, the "Millenial Real," are pretty much over.  Replaced with a more Corporate Memphis figuration. It's been all so assimilated, these look like yesterday but they were 50 years ago. It's a failure of an artworld to collectively remember. CAWD, ten years ago: "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves." Still repeating ourselves.

JJ Manford at Derek Eller Gallery

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The artist inventing interiors. From ether, a decor not previously existing, and yet they are so quotidian? There's pathos to inventing something so normal. Stock photographs. Is this trying to fit in? To conform? Plugging into the Matrix with its infinite karate, cars, stunts, and the guy invents .. a red dressed blonde? Desire so built around nostalgia. Because we've all sat here. Which is comfort, and hard to invent new forms of that. That wishing small sometimes actually gets the sandwich they desire. Plug into the world of pure imagination and invent: a rug. 

David Korty at Derek Eller Gallery

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Laying somewhere in a lineage between Carrol Dunham, David Reed, Math Bass, painting becomes cipher, a code for it, turned into its puzzle pieces. PR: figures "haunting me from logos and bygone cartoons, advertisements meant to sell desires more than childhood entertainments." The wacky fun of painting converted to information, iconographies of, which connote but don't mean. We feel like we could make sense of these, connecting the dots between its puzzled parts. But we won't, they are their scrambled non-sequitur. What is important to note is that painting converted to symbols for it.