Catalina Ouyang at Lyles & King

(link)

Like Scifi, charred and melted. Like Matthew Barney's Silent Hill. Like a phantasm gone bad. Spoiled fantasy. A darker more evil drawing. An oil painting of your mother dead for her 60th birthday. 60 candles burning.  Blood letting to amuse guests. Asking god to hit you. Not asking about certain stains on your boyfriend's sheets. Oh this clown suit? No. A specific detail no one asked for. A dog no one remembers missing. A shelf full of books documenting a very specific historical massacre. Christmas. Wounds before penicillin. Burial grounds for the French. You open the door to find a wiggling mass. Wetness spreading. Lawnskeeper's sheds. European forests. Men in colonial uniforms. Puritans. Deformed by primitive science. The dark unbridled night. Children in wet coats. Forced to carry their young. Trees that have done unspeakable things. The town's records placed into a coal fire. Vast quantities of underground earth moved. Children lost to mines. Civil war bone saws. Early submarines. Comfort homes. History's bruise. Folktales become truth. Deer with a misaligned face. Horns of plenty.

Diane Simpson, Lesley Vance at Herald St & Dana Deguilio, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at Lyles & King

(link)

American art's geo-politics are usually microtized to endless laments of their 5 years in the Bronx licensing gentrification's complaint but little spoken in wider terms unless under the rubric of "globalization" accrediting an exoticism as somehow conceptually justifiable. But artistic geo-politics in the middle ground above rent whinging, and questions of "upstate," but then the weird flyover marsh 2,7894 miles in between, and should we buy a building in Detroit and the perennial and eternal decision of L.A., but everyone today definitely fleeing Chicago, except Diane Simpson firmly planted since the 70s. Everyone today, including CAD, Vance, Degulio, Zuckerman-Hartung: all midwest evacuees. And David soon yes you too.
The material question underlying all the choices of final willingness to exchange rent for intangibles is "will we be visible?" Which is generally lessened to, "Will someone trek out to studio visits there?" or forebodingly, "Is there even someone there to make studio visits?"  Art is fueled by the same overhead as any business. New York once contained the largest and loudest broadcast mechanisms fueled by it's nouveau-wealth that made it the all-powered center that has continually lost ground to the flattening distribution means, but you still got to get the show to be able to be moved. Simpson's regional success to led to some powerful coasters including her in strong group shows and now on people's radar. Vance early to L.A. Conspiratorially MZ-H&DD - regional stars of CAD's homeland - finally left Chicago to have their first exhibition featured when a world over CAD was setting up shop under a palm tree.