Mai-Thu Perret at Barbara Weiss

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At what point is it an "archaeology of modernism" "about its vanished, unredeemed visions" and at what point is it recasting its forms in more precious materials, as designer souvenirs of that history? Kobro is deeply underrepresented, sure. I've got t-shirts for sale:

Mai-Thu Perret at MAMCO

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Painting is the ultimate art commodity but these still feel like the commodes of home catalogs and design-porn magazines. Souvenirs of a high-end experience. Perhaps Perret predicting the craft object trends. The pottery on everyones shelves. The neon signs somehow trending in summer cottages. Perret originally created a narrative of a fictional utopia which "produced" the artworks. Which is all the funnier since the trends that look like hers all premise themselves on the selling of hopeful futures, the crafts we will all already be acclimated to post-apocalypse, raku firing our dreams. Perret eventually got rid of the utopia fiction, and then they became just art, much less utopic.

Mai-Thu Perret at David Kordansky

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"Féminaire consists primarily of two bodies of work: [...] figurative sculptures positioned on a single plinth and a gridded wall arrangement of dozens of ceramic wall pieces"
"Immediate physicality is also a defining feature of the ceramic wall works [...]"
"Beginning with uniform rectangular slabs, Perret uses her hands to distort the material into torqued, unpredictable shapes [...] interaction between the artist’s body and the clay that absorbs her actions."

Against the delicate humans reposed, a visceral deforming of material. The body torqued, crushed with fingerprint remnant, a single hole. The figures have guns. Buy whichever, the holed or gunned, you wish, people watching sublimated wounds happen.


See too: Mark Prent at Mitchell Algus, Mai-Thu Perret, Olivier Mosset at VnH

Mai-Thu Perret, Olivier Mosset at VnH

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"In early 2010, scientists in Italy announced that rattan wood would be used in a new "wood to bone" process for the production of artificial bone. The process takes small pieces of rattan and places it in a furnace. Calcium and carbon are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced. This process produces almost an exact replica of bone material. The process takes about 10 days. At the time of the announcement the bone was being tested in sheep and there had been no signs of rejection. Particles from the sheep's bodies have migrated to the "wood bone" and formed long continuous bones. The new bone-from-wood programme is being funded by the European Union. Implants into humans are anticipated to start in 2015.^[12]"

The third result for "rattan" Google searches returns, after wiki and dictionary results, Ikea's website. And thus our global domineers providing dystopian furniture to the masses and our futuristically repaired bodies are made of the same object harvested from Indonesian labor.

Group Show at David Kordansky

Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this "immersive installation" wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas. Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way "oopsie" sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech.


see too : John Armleder at Fernand Leger , Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Martine Bedin, Mai-Thu Perret at Fondation Speerstra



The pairing of these two make more than sense. Mai-Thu Perret's slurping the modernist milk shake regurgitated as placating design - the astral plane of wallpaper’s elsewhereness spiritual dispersion; and Martine Bedin’s, of the Memphis Group, reinvigoration of design as a skew, eschewed, and totally screwed modernism; into something awkward, mysterious and its own. Like a Heimo Zobernig designed by burglar clowns, Bedins’ works seem at first to make some sort of sense before falling apart in their unfunctionality. Its an old trick, the functional looking functionless object, but its rendered here just strange enough, that the way in which it falls is sometimes a surprise, mocking its expected outcome, at its best when you can never figure out why it looked functional to begin with.