Mary Mito at Downs & Ross

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The psychedelia of noise, legitimized through force, Herculean effort to reconstitute pile, of the rubble we predict will become: What you feel when is all the possibility of construction, and all the effort towards, meaning, desire, as the romans ruined to rubble, these paintings.


see too: Vija Celmins at Matthew Marks, Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

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The sexy hotdogs, as a friend said, but there's no hotdogs here. Yet the sex remains, latently.  Oldenburg innuendo slicked to the surface, in the stroke of the brush we could call lascivious. The same strokes that delineated super hero breasts comicly. In latex suits forming questions other comic artists posed as, "Is Amazon Girl's super power the ability to squeeze that figure into that suit?" Squeeze that meat into that casing. Besides a few hands, here the meat is removed, only the surface remains. The move from painting products to business suits perhaps stating an equivalent that's uncomfortable. Is the suit the product, or a surface of sex that sells? Or, maybe hotdogs weren't selling that well. "Our focus is on incremental volumes and mix improvements coming from new products." Because these are products. Eventually, the question of fitting into suits is answered with the perhaps empowering, "Nah, they can all do that."

Andrea Crespo at Downs & Ross

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The Deviant Art and similar holdings of niche communities, of which Crespo has spoken, and cautions against exoticizing, i.e. the "longtail" populations coalescing around alternative and often subaltern formulations of identity and outlets for expression of desires/needs outside dominant frames, not necessarily just alternate sexual aspects of futanari or furry et al, but growing niche groups seeking alternative expressions of sensitivities - similar but not inclusive to fetish relations to sexuality - and their aesthetic experiments in alternate systems of visual expressions for such sensitivities that are so attuned as to be outside the given framework for acceptability, niche communities exactly, we can be obviously very sympathetic, is very similar to art, and which Crespo draws from.