Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew

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Residuals, remains, ashes, essence, marks, history, artifact. Your own level of animism denies or allows belief in encoding memory into objects. Or be like an On Kawara painting, encapsulating the object by presenting its ghost. Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them. We leave traces, deformations in the world in our shape. At the end, ashes; perhaps your name scratched in history, or a hint of your face in a generation of children, offspring who are getting the residuals. But the object is gone, and like all behaved conceptual art there is a story.

“Room Raiders” at Mathew

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"On the show, three men or women have their rooms inspected, or "raided" by another single man or woman. At the end of the episode, the raider chooses to go on a date with one of them based on the contents of their rooms. The three contestants watch and comment, while sitting in a van, as their rooms are inspected. After the raider has finished with each of the rooms, the three contestants then raid the raider's room. Finally, the raider confronts the three contestants and makes his or her choice.^"

Which explains the interior design lighting to establish the scene, the artwork as personal artifacts unearthed from homes, pulling inflatable after inflatable out of your holes. What could a person really need with so many inflatable orcas. Perhaps a pool out back. Room raiders turned the common reality contestant into archaeologist inferring the life of the suitor. Regardless of the accuracy the point was we believed it possible for at least two seasons. Which means we believe its possible in art, objects as refractive lens into another, artist or owner, giving it meaning, a totem transformed. You opening your neighbors cabinet to find the hand labeled essence of books, we read shelves like we read people. The painting asking back at its viewer what do you represent?

Megan Francis Sullivan at Mathew

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"At the beginning of her book, [Johnston] asks a question that seems to me to belong more to the realm of sociology: whether art, “as exercised and commodified in our society, as seen through the prism of the most successful living artist in America today, is a good medium for encouraging human interpersonal development. Or does it provide an enclave for one class of people, artists, to dwell further on the their alienation from society in general?”

Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations

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Our bodily tumult like serial killer sprees in some hallowed halls, the offices of Texte Zur Kunst, Buchholz, Mathew, Lars Friedrich’s apartment - our representation fractured in the need to stash our bodies everywhere in art franchised, split spread divide and reconnect - of course we become like monsters tentacling and "suck[ing] unborn fetuses out of pregnant women" to maintain our youthful semio-capital.


See too: Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Brendan Fowler at Mathew

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Historically, a stitch would have, in time, saved nine. But time falls apart. That Gildan's Heavy Cotton 5 pack is 9.97$. The entrepreneur increasing stitches per time's inch warps our fabric into the non-Euclidean lettuce-like frill adorning our cuffs and cravats. Yet everyone desperate announcing, "but I don't want to be a pirate" capitalistically but everyone secretly is. And wants to be. Luddites replace with their opposite, robot overlords sedimenting material fetishes.

See too: Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

Richard Phillips at Mathew

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Yeah that Richard Phillips, channeling Wool and Oehlen in the fabric with a playboy bunny.

There's an old artworld legend, that as far as known here is true: of a famed and admired painter, European and critical darling, 6 or 7 figure painter, this is 2003, painter with a waiting list and shows sold before even openings, this painter deciding to exhibit at a small provincial gallery of the American midwest in what couldn't even be called the garage of the green front lawn of a suburban home but a sort of concrete storage shed not much larger than the honest to goodness 6 or 7 figure painting being shown in 6 square meters of gallery space, to be sold out of that shed. It was one of those star-struck mutually beneficial kind of deals. Artists using the full breadth of their powers and burning it as gift, street cred for economy kind of deals.

This exhibition is like the black oily bizarro version of that legend.

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

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In terms of the surveilled children’s toys of Ceccaldi’s past, this is it at its most literal. The big HAL-eye of an Orwellian god’s omniscience. The precarity of the wearables and our own survey of them felt fragile and impure, dirtying their weight with our unclean sight. This PR’s hamfisted Biblical rhetoric, blackened eyes, and spooky theater attempt some pagan significance but its toys themselves which speak so well addressing the latent culture and not the the Nightmare Factory branding it, perhaps brilliant in its overdoneness.


See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.

Ken Okiishi at Mathew



Okiishi’s interest in “internet-networks” should come preloaded with the knowledge that relevancy in the instant availability of the digital panopticon red water requires constant change, adapt or be obsolete, things lose whatever luster they had quick, and though not every exhibition is required to be a hit, everyone is immediately aware of a bunt. And we’re seeing vapid television programming again.

See also: Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM

Megan Francis Sullivan at Mathew



"Underlying the works are arcs of expression that involve acts of making, using, and shuffling; not loyal or invested in ideas of identity or time, they employ references and symbols that undermine and renew their signifying possibilities."

I'm not saying anything but this last line of the PR is pretty much exactly the way a New York Times article defined the hipster, and this exhibition is, like, it: attaching signifiers to your person, holographing identity in symbolic chains. Here supplied in an endless redirect of randomized non-meaning, I to J, a cyclical mire of referential confoundment, Tom Burr, Rosa Bonheur, maybe refreshing in its abyssmal void-rasa, but once you understand the game the jig is, generally, up: we're left with a neo-post-Apple pastiche, chromes and whites, formal. The starry skyed Sturtevantness of it all. I mean that Jamaican flag? I to J, so symbolically literal.