Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery

(link)

Encrust things with jewels, add a few art historical references to the nature of our mort and you got yourself a stew. The mold adds a delightful balance to what would have been all too saccharine wealth. Previously Ryan's had been less explicitly bejeweled even when they were explicitly jewelry. (Though the material confusions/substitutions that Ryan has a knack been themed throughout.)  But here the material question is less of clever substitution and more reminiscent of Tara Donovan where a certain quality is quantity: the compositionalizing of such an amount seems more like the excuse to amass such a quantity. A reason to put so many gems together. NYT magazine called "critiques of excess" which I find delirious. Excess does not inherently critique excess. Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility. A car that belches exhaust to critique global warming.


See too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center, Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

Ingrid Luche at Ghebaly Gallery

(link)

"Ghost Dresses" seem to be based-off Amerindian ritual Ghost Dances and Ghost shirts, which sounds a bit like cultural appropriation since - according to wikipedia - Ghost Dance rituals were intended to make the white colonialists leave. Which white spaces they find themselves now refashioned in. Maybe the French aren't so sensitive to such matters. Maybe this is a bonafide attempt to make the colonialists leave. Seems like the PR would have touched on that. Either way it seems like the point is that eventually everything will be able to be overlaid into everything else, you buy a cultural anything with everything, anything, on it, you have can have anything with a t-shirt on it. You can order it online. Everything will be put into everything else.

Channa Horwitz at Ghebaly Gallery

(link)

It's maybe treating the arbitrary with such taut thin lines, with laborious specificity to chart chance - "aleatory openness" - in cryptography the sampling of physical phenomena is required for true random number generation. Noise. Which are charted in webs of delicacy. That information look. Corrections in the margins underscoring, by acknowledging the flaws pointing towards, the ideal they aspire to, that there even is an ideal, however far from it, even if irrational.

Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery

(link)

Painting the walls of your cage generally comes in less literal forms. The artist as tempestuous gorilla acquiescing to perform his own repairs on the prison of his cell, look how nice these bars I have erected are, how polished this fencing. When you could simply change the focus to what's outside. Instead some vague construction. The old predicament of art, to peel away the stickers marking the surface of cynicism: our Bad Boy Attitude. Elegiac Walls. All of this is obvious, it's right there, legible; the point is that it’s alluring. We want to keep them around.