Maryam Jafri at Kai Matsumiya

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The schizo of culture is well stated; advertising diamonds next to atrocities is news. But rather than documents of raw schizophrenia, Jafri's ability to wrest visual homology in paradox makes the point both elegant and clear. Culture subjectification is a catch-22, no exit, mirror chamber. Jafri lays out a funhouse of our ourselves, cartoon reflections in warped media. Fun!

While this could be confused with cargo-cult droppings, with the compositionalized detritus of "interpretation box theory of art"- its important to note the distinction. The composition is not intended to hay-wire content. It isn't jumbled wreckage on altars, but clear and concisely packaged for its cataloging. Arguable. 

Steffani Jemison at Kai Matsumiya

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Some have suggested the notes are meaningless, the random scribblings of a man who by all accounts was functionally illiterate and demonstrated a low IQ. Olson is quick to argue otherwise. He is convinced the codes could contain leads about where McCormick was or with whom he met in the last hours before his corpse was abandoned to rot along with his secrets.
Ricky McCormick always stood out as different from his peers. His mother, Frankie Sparks, describes him as "retarded." His cousin Charles McCormick, who shared a brotherly relationship with Ricky for most of his life, says Ricky would often talk "like he was in another world" and suspects Ricky might have suffered from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
"The only thing he could write was his name," Sparks says. "He didn't write in no code." Charles McCormick recalls Ricky "couldn't spell anything, just scribble."
Don Olson stands by his assessment, however.
"I have every confidence that Ricky wrote the notes," Olson says. -riverfronttimes

Art's theft of pretty much everything, dredging culture for its composition, find its emblem here, a social signifier of all of art's making hieroglyphs of itself, items totally meaningless and full. 

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

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discombobulating the characters, Snow White and the black protagonist cultural antipodes, forced atop each other, its Disney surely dissonant with black male experience: a snippet plays stating that a lot of women were roused to voting early which would have felt reassuring then had we not later learned white women voted Trump. Sadness feeling most intense when there is nothing to be done with it, can't be channeled, and the depression of your body on the mattress becomes sinister cave, stuck to National Public Radio's days before the US election, an anachronism replayed in your head, is made worse in actually having the recording. Enough emotional dissonance eventually causing psychologic desensitization, feeling a lot like living slumber.

Rainer Ganahl at Kai Matsumiya

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Institutional critique, was, at its base, a reflexive gesture, navel gazing en abyme, setting up a giant system of mirrors of various funhouse effects within the institution, but if we've learned nothing its that silvered surfaces sell really well. We desire nothing more than to see ourselves. And seeing everyone else is like ourselves in a strange mirror. And seeing other art patrons is like seeing ourselves in relation to ourselves, seeing a grand and baroque vaulting network of ourselves in a hierarchy of ourselves. And seeing a Jeff Koons painting is like seeing ourselves replaced with Barbie plastic.  We see ourselves in so many ways. It's all we really want.

See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.