Nicolas Party at The Modern Institute

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As Party hues desaturate the underpinning becomes clearer: banality. It was always there it was just masked by Party lighting. The Disco turned off, the overhead lights reveal your unpleasant face. In the other room of the paintings of the world burning? That's your friend reminding you you've got work tomorrow, now today. The world is on Fire! Thanks Nicolas! Gosh sure wish we hadn't taken all those Party drugs yesterday. I might be able to feel something about this impossibly lackluster apocalypse of today. But this is how the world ends, incredibly mediocre paintings. 

Nicolas Party at The Modern Institute

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The world is insane so act like it. The decor turned to 11, become lurid, horrible. Isn't that our world currently? The berating of sense. Have you come to enjoy your pummeling? And is Party's really what others have called "sincerity and joy"? "Polychromy" states the press release, as if maybe we thought of Greek statues colored as they were, this would be our world now. But our eyes experience exhaustion, our cones cannot handle, biological imprints on our art a certain taste as barrier against a visual depletion, but maybe we would learn to love this chromatic pain.

Andrew J. Greene at The Modern Institute

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You could think of Greene as a decorator in our semiotic apocalypse picking through the ruins of what we would have probably rather forgot. The obsolescent and malformed. It's some malignant Frankenweenie archaeology. The 1984 version. No one would mistake these for pleasant. Not even quite kitsch, but some anti-nostalgial form. The question of what to do with our rubble is a pertinent one. These things, despite their delegation to the back burners of culture, of closets and bins, still linger and Greene scrounges back to re-festive our lives with. We don't necessarily want it.


see too: David Lieske at MUMOK

Amanda Ross-Ho at Mary Mary

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What a good cruel show. There’s more photos on Mary Mary’s website. Click and drag virtual to our emotional scales, our pain. 10. Until the walls are howling. Size is a cruelty, we don’t want our more fragile moments blown up on walls. Child burn units developed these, for children pre language, to describe their pain as burned children, white rooms of red. Is there anything more unimaginable than this?  As a means of exchange we turn emotion into a signifier, turn it into plastic information, capable of all sorts of manipulation. “A universal metric to measure human suffering” Your pain is universal, equivocal, exchangeable for the pain of others. This is the best we could come up with to communicate with red children. The world is still primitive, its virtualization even more so. We all fear technology but not its precursors. (like)

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Sue Tompkins at The Modern Institute

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The painting's ineptness could almost be salved with reminders of Tompkin's enjoyably askew performances, the hollow echoes of paintings like. Today everyone verbs the noun. "Performs Painting" "Investigates Painting." And Painting saved by performance has become a trope. At least these have Polaroids as appendages to make them kind of do a jig.


See too:  Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

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As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, autocratic leaders, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

Anne Collier at The Modern Institute

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As Sturtevant foretold, "appropriation" post internet is different indeed, no longer political or even contentious, "theft" is airquoted, artists incredulous at being called out on it. It was perhaps the youtube era of Supercuts, a "genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage" garnering millions of views, tumblr collections reported on in NYTimes, pinterest boards, the age of aggregators and the lines outside the door for Marclay's Clock, arrangement became meaning, content, "appropriation" went full populist. In the absolute deluge of images as the fount of internet opened it made sense for the archivist impulse to popularize as people tried to make sense of the mess, of the overstimulation of everything all once, that could be divided arranged, made into little groupings of sense. Sturtevant on the other hand started making nightmares.

Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute

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Of course cans, as named, invoke emptiness (a filled cans would be called by what they contain, a soda, sardines, refried beans) but, clean, the possibility for containment, the ability to can, canning, the process for preserving, pickling,  a funny metaphor for the preservation of an artist's hand severed from them, held in brine, they look green through the glass museums place to frame them, objects which maintain the objects, pickled. Artists willingly put their objects in such canisters, even the most ephemeral are given some package tradeable, they are the bridge between two hands shaking. If it wasn't, at least in some way transmissible, tranistable, it would be broken.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Erika Vogt at Mary Mary

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A little too big for their own good, the sculptures exhibit the tendencies of the oaf, too present. "Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction." There's no space for you here, they put you on the stage of their theater: Vogt's objects all placed on the cusp of Personal distance (Far Phase) "for interactions among good friends or family." "Under circumstances where normal space requirements cannot be met, such as in public transit or elevators, personal space requirements are modified accordingly. According to the psychologist Robert Sommer, one method of dealing with violated personal space is dehumanization. He argues that on the subway, crowded people often imagine those intruding on their personal space as inanimate." And the sculptures you. 

Toy with human scale.


See too:  Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co, , Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mark Handforth at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Milano Chow at Mary Mary

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Ornateness and decadence is given the silent treatment, made square, hard-edge and if-not-quite cruel at least ordered to austerity, its skin off. They become Clue boards, picturing images as signs to feel in need of decoding, the compositional feng-shui that makes objects mysterious, play along if you like.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan,  Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

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Takala's The Committee, is a story of children given fantastical power faced with the continually dwindling possibilities of real: a child's unfathomable wealth, 7000£, quickly grinding down and halting the committee. The fantastic cannot be realized. One child equates the once impossible amount to a mere 7 iPhones. It's not enough for everyone. Unblinkered several children move quickly through history proposing different corporate schemes to generate profits with websites and business models (already envisioning themselves receiving discounts on fees) to sustain their wants, and the whole thing moving from open possibility to well-trod territory with a patterned timing. Watching the death of the possible in people so young raises questions of whether this is simply precocious social replication of the status quo, or whether capitalism is just natural to us and there really is limited amount of practical means and invention in world. The children, in the end, get a single -albeit large - bouncy castle.
The limits of invention are apt to both art's open escapes (eyerollingly) and Pivli for whom most of the films generously on view here each take their genre from established entertainment, candid camera shows, Kids Say the Darndest Things, prank videos, etc. Meaning while actual modes within possibility might be limited, that its all about how you work within the framework. The children, in the end, get a single - albeit large - bouncy castle.

Group Show at Mary Mary

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The loaded vacancy of de Chirico, which everyone early learns is caused by discrepant perspective amplified by late Italian sun, here duplicated in a way that averts explanation, objects taking on the same eschew weight hovering with a coded urgency of stark quiet.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan , Group Show at Salle Principale

Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

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Since sculptural figuration’s wastelanding after modernism, its return in inhumanist impulse made sense in conceptual and post-minimal fallout. The humanist passe was instead fit into the acceptable accounting methods of the 60's ruling doctrine, and begetting experiments fitting the body into the cold baths of art’s de rigeur; e.g. Nauman’s uncanny serialization of it. It continued time and artist again until it started actually resembling the body reflected in cold capital, looking prescient for whole new reasons, e.g. Katharina Fristch, Rachel Harrison, etc. or even treating it kin architectural vessel like Andrew Wekua.
And but so its interesting to have someone actually sympathetic to brutal goo of bodies figuration, even insisting on abject Humanism, intercepting hail mary from Louise Bourgoise, without having to treat it to some quasi-spirituality of Kiki Smith or Gober, in firmly materialist occultism.
The work’s overt sentimentality is overboarding, but treads in the acknowledgment of its cliche, the real material of history, well worn, without resorting to symbolic bags of concrete as representative of history to sink the whole ship in awful triteness. The affective pathos of the skin rendered wool and sleeping, really laying it all out there, held in stasis by the uncanny facelessness, just barely hanging in there, the theatricality might be over, but fresh materiality flees drowning symbolism.

Richard Wright at The Modern Institute



Wright continues his laborious ephemerations castaway from the wall, casting glass to cast light ephemerals back on the walls, light as a brush. Beautify your site-specificity, home, lobby, whatever, it’s made-to-order non-representational design service fitting niche market of anywhere you wanna be. “Wright has adapted the technique initially employed in his recent commission for Tate Britain’s eastern windows, in the Milbank foyer." Museum wing, to gallery, to your home, totally beautiful.

“Inside Arrangement” at Mary Mary
John Finneran, Jonathan Gardner, John McAllister, Gerda Scheepers, Sam Windett



Much painting has come to resemble pop or electronic music, overfilled genres in which the stifling amount in oversaturated markets leaves little room new, the micro advancements recycled from the waste mines of the past, looking for that new sound that rockets to the top of charts, played in every club - a brief intense pleasure, briefly, before everyone else leeches onto that sound, and once again sounds bland, recycled, grey. Painters seem scrambling for that remix of styles that looks so candy cane pleasurable. A new form, a rethought style, the oblique approach to re-critique past participles, the re-appropriated language of art, pasts verbs become nouns rearranged on a surface.
This show got all the pop of paintings now. That meta-winking but direct surface. The post-critical critical. Shining colors. The just so slight flat, flat-footed picture plane. It looks great. Scheepers paintings definitely hitting the sound of tomorrow’s moment, a sort of meta-kassay poptronics. The Bonnardian Instagram of yesteryear in flat Mcallister. The loosed goose of Finnerman’s Munchian spirtually brushy. Sam Windett’s a little too earnest brushy futurism. And the awkward illustrations. These five have to be making the most desirable paintings today.