Amanda Ross-Ho at Mary Mary

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What a good cruel show. There’s more photos on Mary Mary’s website. Click and drag virtual to our emotional scales, our pain. 10. Until the walls are howling. Size is a cruelty, we don’t want our more fragile moments blown up on walls. Child burn units developed these, for children pre language, to describe their pain as burned children, white rooms of red. Is there anything more unimaginable than this?  As a means of exchange we turn emotion into a signifier, turn it into plastic information, capable of all sorts of manipulation. “A universal metric to measure human suffering” Your pain is universal, equivocal, exchangeable for the pain of others. This is the best we could come up with to communicate with red children. The world is still primitive, its virtualization even more so. We all fear technology but not its precursors. (like)

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Erika Vogt at Mary Mary

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A little too big for their own good, the sculptures exhibit the tendencies of the oaf, too present. "Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction." There's no space for you here, they put you on the stage of their theater: Vogt's objects all placed on the cusp of Personal distance (Far Phase) "for interactions among good friends or family." "Under circumstances where normal space requirements cannot be met, such as in public transit or elevators, personal space requirements are modified accordingly. According to the psychologist Robert Sommer, one method of dealing with violated personal space is dehumanization. He argues that on the subway, crowded people often imagine those intruding on their personal space as inanimate." And the sculptures you. 

Toy with human scale.


See too:  Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co, , Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mark Handforth at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Milano Chow at Mary Mary

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Ornateness and decadence is given the silent treatment, made square, hard-edge and if-not-quite cruel at least ordered to austerity, its skin off. They become Clue boards, picturing images as signs to feel in need of decoding, the compositional feng-shui that makes objects mysterious, play along if you like.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan,  Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Group Show at Mary Mary

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The loaded vacancy of de Chirico, which everyone early learns is caused by discrepant perspective amplified by late Italian sun, here duplicated in a way that averts explanation, objects taking on the same eschew weight hovering with a coded urgency of stark quiet.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan , Group Show at Salle Principale

“Eat Abstractedly” at Mary Mary

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Photography is in a good place right now, pre-packaged in a liquid asset - no matter how banal (say, Jakschik) or garishly putrid (Gordon) the work becomes subject, concept. All work equalized under the format and coherent, any artistic dissonance mediated by the format. In the diaspora of images available today, any practice is coherent in comparison. The image package. The predetermined object, say even a chair, a format, allows an immediate relation to, a lozenge for swallowing. The slight remove allowing its crystalline vessel. A photo of anything, a feed of it.

See sculpture too : Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery and as well : Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi , Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger

“Inside Arrangement” at Mary Mary
John Finneran, Jonathan Gardner, John McAllister, Gerda Scheepers, Sam Windett



Much painting has come to resemble pop or electronic music, overfilled genres in which the stifling amount in oversaturated markets leaves little room new, the micro advancements recycled from the waste mines of the past, looking for that new sound that rockets to the top of charts, played in every club - a brief intense pleasure, briefly, before everyone else leeches onto that sound, and once again sounds bland, recycled, grey. Painters seem scrambling for that remix of styles that looks so candy cane pleasurable. A new form, a rethought style, the oblique approach to re-critique past participles, the re-appropriated language of art, pasts verbs become nouns rearranged on a surface.
This show got all the pop of paintings now. That meta-winking but direct surface. The post-critical critical. Shining colors. The just so slight flat, flat-footed picture plane. It looks great. Scheepers paintings definitely hitting the sound of tomorrow’s moment, a sort of meta-kassay poptronics. The Bonnardian Instagram of yesteryear in flat Mcallister. The loosed goose of Finnerman’s Munchian spirtually brushy. Sam Windett’s a little too earnest brushy futurism. And the awkward illustrations. These five have to be making the most desirable paintings today.