Megan Francis Sullivan at Mathew

(link)

"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?”

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.