“Portraits” at Foxy Production

(link)

Strange no, that we adorn the world with pics of ourselves? Think of the prevalence of us in stock images, in advertising space, on the broad sides of buses, men and women smiling. And all the possible wishes that artists themselves hadn't given up this form so readily and instead deal with it. There is a lot of information embedded in our visages. A real psychotic kaleidoscope, ourselves.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

(link)

Appending painting the body it both does and does not want. Inflating it to bulbousness, we want body but not, you know... too much that would be a fetish, we want it sleek and slim for transaction, shipping, but here we find painting's brushwork metastasized and images become their nightmare: embodied. "How to achieve a flawless look with NO CAKE FACE."  There's an anxiety over the body, over the crust these harbor. We paint our bodies to appear as images and our paintings as bodied objects, a subject recently reoccurring in art but mainly through the things that infer it, euphemism. You see lots of chairs and innuendo, things to speak of the body but god forbid not show it, but in Beavers we find it explicit, too much, hanging out off its frame like a gut.


See too: Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

(link)

Culture ate Warhol, and the body is spectacularly insane, but culture wants the body flat, glossy and sharp, like the Warhol which became fame, and Beavers reanimating the body's real corpus in such a culture that does not want it feels like real horror.


see too: Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento,

Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento

(link)
Let’s not make anything of the Instagram origins conceptual juicing. Beavers’ shift from edging foodporn to straight porno-esque, the nails, lips, decommissioned musculature of engines, the post-coital stub, phallic carving exposing the more explicitly latent. Pulling from the world’s vast reserve of images made to speak about its desires. Let’s not make much of the countless men sculpting countless phallus. Rounding the lips express the touch, cuuuuuurves, till the last one looks like a butthole. puckered. None of Instagrams perfect white lighting, everything appearing soaked in ink, coated in oil. The dry scrapping of the brush around the curves. Trippy in the battle of discerning what is relief and illusion in image.

See too: Gina Beavers at Retrospective

Gina Beavers at Retrospective



A layer of conceptual strata as addendum, Beaver takes photos from the "unending" stream of Instagram foodporn, and consecrates them in big thick crusty blobs of paints. Its annoying conceptual gesture dissolves the once interesting paintings into imaging the much more interesting direct visual feed of people’s egoed desires, the entirety of raw production of an entire population’s uploaded desire, Instagram, a total headfuck to look at. Instead here we have some relief of low interest paintings that were kind of interesting until put into the context of that abyss of spiraling accumulation of so much network juice. That old vampire trick of draining one thing into a another and leaving behind a corpse. I kind of liked the paintings.