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.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at Halsey McKay

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It'd be nice if art could find a way to bestow its halo without requiring the frame of painting, the shape of abstraction. The PR reminds that knitting is an old art. Tapestries were once the more expensive object, more labor embedded. Eventually labor became cheap, automated, and culturally shabby. So we invented the chic, the mythic art of genius, financialized its abstraction. Markets soared. Became the mold.


See too: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires, Ann Cathrin November Høibo at DREI

Hilary Pecis at Halsey McKay

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Gingham filters for our paintings. Nostalgia you can adjust on a slider. The equivalent of jeans that come pre-torn, factory fresh history. Surely our craving for this nostalgia's cake, a symptom of insecure times. The obvious reference to Wood's would fail to account for this theme'd overlay, and closer thematics perhaps in Davey's search in means of prewashing our tech with its past.


See too: Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz