Rebecca Brewer, Rochelle Goldberg at Oakville Galleries

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our desire for a materiality comes at the hands of world we increasingly do not touch. And so art must become a hyperstimulus; art must make us, perverts of novelty, feel something through glass, by sight, because our hands have been removed to a world we touch only through electrified track pads, through eyes, through a world like advertisement. And art, for all its self-segregation, increasingly must compete with entirety of visual diaspora, entering into mass cultural networks, instagram and webpages becoming its channels, same as all the other. The gloss of Artforum is now a forlorn beacon in comparison. How does art compel belief in its higher order. We now compete with actual images of dead oiled fish. Art excesses itself, crusts, proofs its real.

Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries & Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama

(Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries, Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama)

We aren't normally delivered the fantastical in such explicit forms. That tasteful hint of surreality mirroring our own world feeling deformed, malleable to invisible hands. Things feel pretty strange these days, so much so that fantasy surrealism almost feels quaint, safe. A big ornament in the sky feels relatively benign in that scientists - as a means to cool our planet - are researching global scale "stratospheric aerosol injections" of sulphuric acid. Spraying 5 million tons of acid into the sky as serious funded research, the world has become a cartoon where the actors wields huge mallets, and the world bends like goo to their violence.