Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings

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By throwing their stuff, themselves, into the ocean they were able to keep a freedom, their lives, a paradox that Okiishi has obvious misgivings over placing current lives back in the desert buried. Stripped of your heritage how free did you remain, the question. Now Okiishi, a new transport of history towards oceans which left the LA Times wondering what was in the puppet head box rather than the seemingly more pertinent question of this displacements of an Ames Iowa basement's catalyst. No one packs up a van without reason, a much less exciting white Ferrari of Okiishi's time vehicle, precisely one car load, kept, allowed into the future. The amount one can carry. What can be preserved as our possessions-as-selves eroding in time streamlined against current's abrasion. Which amass more in new homes. What will be the last object of yours finally cast into waste by your children? Objects carry briefly into tomorrow, but the artist is allowed attempts to loft their objects onto the generational ships of museums, while entire histories of others are and have been lost. Like Dahn Vo's attempt to carry Martin Wong's possessions, or even Cianciolo's corrugate time vessels, we allow a certain amount of artistic provenance into the future, and all the hope for it.


See: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings

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Untitled 2016, We're serenaded to a drive's Concerto in D (major), in prosaic's extreme, until the camera zooms onto a skeletal billboard stripped of the flesh that should sell, its meat, before the camera pans over to yet another billboard through bones showing the heavens behind it that should be eclipsed by content. The metaphor seems apt. It's nice to not have content. Blankness. For there sometimes to be nothing at all.

Then there's Okiishi's PR'd concern for his "bubbles" and "tubes" forming the "linked-together aggregations of masses of actors" sharing the angst of both Gaugin's "D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous" and, perhaps more apropos to the bubble and tubed, the Smashing Pumpkins' hamster, trapped in a maze despite all his Je nes sais...  The better you can pronounce the issue seems only to aggravate the problem, of painters writers and musicians finding new rhymes for "cage."

“RR ZZ” at Gluck50

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Assemblage 2.0, a nostalgic affair. If everything looks out of an 80's film depiction of basement techno-carpentry, its not so much remergence of childhood's latent memories, but a link to a time still inclusive to all the weird science of going back to the future's possibility, copper and shoe-string objects representative of when, though we didn't understand the flux capacitor, it still held a possibility that today technology no longer does hidden behind opaque fronts of clean glass commodities. For most today, the iphone is closer represented to 2001's Monolith on a moon of Jupiter than the tungsten of Edison. And we feel cold for it. And emerges a wish that one could still believe in our control over technical objects, over magick from the tongue, over the advertorial usurp bodies filmed, for objects that though we don't understand its primitive occult, still seem more understandable than the blank fury of an iPad.

See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, David Lieske at MUMOK, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Ken Okiishi at Mathew



Okiishi’s interest in “internet-networks” should come preloaded with the knowledge that relevancy in the instant availability of the digital panopticon red water requires constant change, adapt or be obsolete, things lose whatever luster they had quick, and though not every exhibition is required to be a hit, everyone is immediately aware of a bunt. And we’re seeing vapid television programming again.

See also: Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM

Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM



The Okiishi TV one of the most confounding artworks of the last number of years. So obvious, ham-handed, and bungled it’s difficult discerning whether miraculous or idiotic. Brilliant commodities that’s for sure and an Artsy page that’s “SOLD” out. Everyone somehow talking about chroma-keys, as if that mattered. For better or worse, if it wasn't fashionable Okiishi producing these, no one would care. Mauss and Okiishi’s desire for the possibility of new images seems deigned to expressing less a new image than the fetishistic desire inherent in images, a sexual teasing of images that of course leave you firmly blue-balled with cash in hand.
The spoons are an interesting nice gesture but feel more camouflage for the exhibition of last year's hot tickets sold once again.