Tyler Coburn at Koenig & Clinton

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We somehow trained for emptiness. Animism, the occult, remote viewing - tools we take from other industries to make sense of the white walls before which shimmer in colored noise because we've been staring so long."too little signal, too much noise" the PR states. In noise we see ghosts. "Upton Sinclair was convinced that his second wife Mary had telepathic abilities" which seems like the intro to a sexist joke, but instead him attempting proof: experiments communicating drawings by mind 40 miles away. 22% accuracy. Here try this one out: I'm sending out what I really think about this show right now. Got it, didn't you? It was inside you all along.


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Albert Herter at Koenig & Clinton

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The cartoon - as the primitive manifestation of the virtual, the ability to treat reality as malleability - feels more and more aptly depictive of the world currently lived, a world governed by abstraction and rulers on whims swapping crutches for legs, swamps for politics, licorice for sustenance. In the future your head will be replaced by a pumpkin and this will be the will of hand we can't see but can all infer, sense will be destroyed and replaced with something much more billowing, slapstick maybe.


See too: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

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A man made blaze-orange and reflective through the stranger emergent rules of capital's risk assessment, donning its anonymous uniform highlighting his labor we are meant to ignore in a world he manicures to pretend the world isn't ending, like we're keeping something intact, like there will be something intact, scrubbing the earth. Channeling all the tragedy of the paradoxical rules that stem from of our world's "rational actors." I.e. To save cents per worker on insurance we paint them orange. Emergence is known for producing some of the most spectacular feats in nature - snowflakes, bird flocks, Giant's Causeway - and in Capital it causes our workers to turn orange. The absurdity is as staggeringly beautiful as it is tragic for the once human who is made subservient to it. I mean maybe this man wanted it. This anonymous and yellow drone trimming our earth to meet the desires of those who control it, channeled here in a photograph of Steiner's personal-as-political best.

Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton



Van der Stokker's Lisa Frank feminism posits an ironic fuck-all to neurotic questioning of gender paranoia's possibility of existing as a stereotype, of pink; e.g. “Parenting the non-girlie girl,” “Loving Pink for Boys, Haiting it for Girls,” “Pink and Blue,” “Toemageddon 2011,” “In Praise of Pink Polish,” “When did girls start wearing pink” “Saving our Daughter from an Army of Princesses,” and “What’s the Problem with Pink Anyway?” A baseline existential question: how am I not myself? I can be who I want to be, but will everyone know that I am being who I want to be? recursive mise-en-abyme into self’s abyss. Van der Stokker ironizes it into its caricature laughability at the same time embraces it. A “best regards” to all those current existential crises. Its mockery’s expense of others cruel in its flippancy.

See also : Lily van der Stokker at Air de Paris