Masaya Chiba at Bel Ami

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Display being a function of reproduction, education. Masaya Chiba's always something pedagogically askew - like there's a presentation happening, there's some thing scientifically flat about the work - illustrative - but without information's answer. They seem to imply some big red arrow that would point out meaning, but lacking it instead presents that interminable inkblot question, 

see too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

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The zany installation needs to make comeback. That science fair exhibit gone wrong of the 90s/00s. Jason Rhoades, Cloaca, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, Christoph Büchel, etc. Everything looked like a laboratory, an industrial factory, used conveyor belts. Rhoade's PeaRoeFoam predicted the late 2010s process orientated abstraction as a giant comedy - art's industrialized factory of charisma, a caricature of the production of aura. It was also enjoyable. Something about the science fair animates and comedies the ideologic process of art's chambers. The conveyer of viewer, the turtle munching mulch, the paintings aloft, the didactics and visible/invisible arrows. Look here, learn this. "You can sit in this chair." Thanks. That the imprisoned turtle is the stand-in for us isn't even that far fetched, just like Foucault said, society is a...

“Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

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Increasing prevalence of the diorama, the miniature, their vessels staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over makes psychologic sense. The world providing ever further customizable habitats to busy ourselves with while remaining deaf to our desires, a lot like playing with dolls.


See too: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts, Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Tris Vonna-Michell at Jan Mot