Diane Simpson at Herald St

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Simpson's is like watching objects preening for their digitalisation, become icons. Begin from "from flat printed matter, renderings of material culture discovered in used bookstores, university libraries, and online archives—pictures of medieval clothing, Art Deco patterns, or commercial packaging design."*  Which as our relationships between 2 and 3D, virtual space and physical space become ever more fraught, (see the ability of IKEA insistence on flat pack, alleviating the physicality of distance and reduce shipping to basically reign over low-end furniture) the details become hardcoded, organics are put into firm boxes, codified, cubicles, far easier to measure pack ship and thus virtualize, it of course feels apt to Simpson's resurgence today: that we enjoy our detached contemplation of our oppressor. We move real world problems into aesthetic fields, which feels like control, they're lovely.


*Kate Nesin, Artforum

Ida Ekblad at Herald St

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Paint coagulates, a crust like Ekblad's Mr. Kellog's Cornflake Scab stuck to fine surfaces. Scabs are excess of bodily presence, we want to pick them, peel them from our elbows, remove the corpsing exuberant. It's itchy. Crust is an overpresence of material. Like Lasker's stupid strokes, a clownishness, an exaggeration of the painterly, of material, of the person for the clown, for Ekblad forcing painting to speak with a mouthful of bubble gum.



See too: Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Diane Simpson, Lesley Vance at Herald St & Dana Deguilio, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at Lyles & King

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American art's geo-politics are usually microtized to endless laments of their 5 years in the Bronx licensing gentrification's complaint but little spoken in wider terms unless under the rubric of "globalization" accrediting an exoticism as somehow conceptually justifiable. But artistic geo-politics in the middle ground above rent whinging, and questions of "upstate," but then the weird flyover marsh 2,7894 miles in between, and should we buy a building in Detroit and the perennial and eternal decision of L.A., but everyone today definitely fleeing Chicago, except Diane Simpson firmly planted since the 70s. Everyone today, including CAD, Vance, Degulio, Zuckerman-Hartung: all midwest evacuees. And David soon yes you too.
The material question underlying all the choices of final willingness to exchange rent for intangibles is "will we be visible?" Which is generally lessened to, "Will someone trek out to studio visits there?" or forebodingly, "Is there even someone there to make studio visits?"  Art is fueled by the same overhead as any business. New York once contained the largest and loudest broadcast mechanisms fueled by it's nouveau-wealth that made it the all-powered center that has continually lost ground to the flattening distribution means, but you still got to get the show to be able to be moved. Simpson's regional success to led to some powerful coasters including her in strong group shows and now on people's radar. Vance early to L.A. Conspiratorially MZ-H&DD - regional stars of CAD's homeland - finally left Chicago to have their first exhibition featured when a world over CAD was setting up shop under a palm tree.

Peter Coffin at Herald St

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Along with Mungo Thompson, Coffin surfing the mid-late 00's vogue for pop inflected conceptual art, cultural forms stressed into 70's reflexive systems. The artists wanted to be cultural pranksters, using the devices of conceptual art's powerful navel strip-mining on the world at large who might finally be made to care about art's tools. But they didn't and so found refuge in the lobbies of museums to friendlify their interiors with symbols the common-man would recognize, but with the value added of a wall-text able to explain why they didn't, and justifying educational budgets, the oldest, blandest, trick in the book.

Ida Ekblad at Herald St.



Having just mentioned painters hands lost in the turning of printing presses painting, here Ekblad arrives making what appear as, though cannot be certified by bombastic press release’s purple prose, monoprint paintings.

Like spaghetti fallen out of pockets in embarrassment - What was once the artist’s distinct color-forms clearly delineated and arranged, what was composed, has been melted into a miasma of stringy faux-naive fuck-all mess, of neophyte graffiti dusting, of everything crumbling. Previous work’s rational ordered pleasure traded for the irrationality of the abject, anal expulsive, as orders fail and worms grow into the corpse and a dried-scab cartoon characters appear to mock your desire for some return to good taste. Their illogic is a horror. Of course half the fun is learning to love it, this next step of gross painting.
Like Josh Smith it was the brash confidence of signatory strokes that held together their flimsy palmed aesthetic. Now the brash confidence of just showing these, currently standing heads above the others racing to re-abjectify abstraction, Smith, Eichwald, Buthe, Sittg etc. etc.

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Aaron Curry at Michael Werner