Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

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The apparition we all throw guesses like darts towards. Knowledge that's predicated on the firming up of agreement, history a handshake between historians. And in this way the amorphous is not an agreeable substance to a culture that would like to make everything fungible, easily transactable. Instead here see things that reveal only us, an elephant we're all hiding in our own personal rooms under big sheets. Ambiguousness is hot right now, the abstractionists with their gluttonous anthropomorphics, the kids with their balloon swollen cartoons, the sculptors with their lumpy things. The ambiguity exemplar of our world's distrust. Who knows who is actually the man behind the curtain.


See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Alice Tippit at Night Club

Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

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The shapeshifting Jinn appears here in abstraction's referential amorphousness, a resemblance that, like inkblots, adapt to the viewer they appear to, and painted with a hapticness lending credence to its apparition as innuendo. Do you see the sunglassed DJ's hi-top fade, do you see a booty shaking, a wailing baby, or a pig outdoors at night through a molar keyhole. The dentist sees a horrible horrible cavity like a portal to hell. You leave a show and realize later no one saw the same thing. The void stares back as it were and the Jinn's phantasm in such concreteness erodes a certainty in material seeing.


“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas [...] Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros horn; [...] But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.” - D+G


See too: Alice Tippit at Night Club, Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center