Kate Newby at Cooper Cole

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Detail views. An enforced sight, enforced noticing. An almost moral underpin, asking for sight, a penance in attention.


see too: Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

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Both's attention to naturalism, to the brown you may have noticed in stores having enveloped our packaging to stand for its green, the ecological concern signified by "brown." And "Natural" you may also have noticed has no FDA governance and can be, without recourse, stated about things like gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, maybe steel nails. Natural, like nature, creates a negative distinction, we are said to go out "into nature" to pretend we are distinct from it, to pretend there worlds distinct from mankind. Like the trend in homes, bars, everyone hauling reclaimed wood by the tonnage deep into the city, West Elm mass producing it, in attempt to reclaim some authentic experience separate from the glass we touch all day in pocket. But the glass like the gallery can bring us anything, it appears on screen, in white fields, in front of you, your touch of nature, your finger grease smeared on it.


Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien

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"deploys her fragmented gestures in the service of a greater alchemy," chipping away at the artistic monument, further granularized to finer and finer pocks and us finally all staring at noise like a church for sensitivity training - commanded to the virtue of noticing.  Like if you removed all the signs from the world asserting "scenic view ahead." As if we could consider it all so. There is no thing to see, no "main thing." Just a forest and trying see every tree for it, any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art.


see too: Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

“Every Day I Make My Way” at Minerva

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Photography may be comprised of the accident, but its an accident captured and cast in the glass of its image; there is nothing more horribly crystallinely concrete than a photograph, "an object which virtually produces itself." Chetrit's video shows its molten form, the slow liquid flow of "photography"'s staging, strung and malleable in its cheesy goo before cooling into its hard representation of us. Photography's glass found perfect deployment in advertising and the commodity who craved its ability to deliver a glass-like surface of perfection that even then Barthes, Benjamin and Sontag were, it's possible to believe, already reacting to then in their nostalgic interest in photography's yellowing, like now pretty much every photographer today not necessarily trying to break the glass, at least looking to place a sticker on it or find some odd way to warm its domination of us, with a filter say, the image.


See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, Tony Conrad's Glass