Na Mira at Park View/Paul Soto

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Mirrors which allow color to spill, bleed. Into the political dimension - a place artworld can see but can't access. Just hope our artwork somehow runs into it. 

Alex Olson at Park View/Paul Soto

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A sort of lacking taste commendable, nice really, being this against grain: "explosion in a Harlequin factory"? in a flannel factory? Some kind of outburst in pattern manufacturing. Though the detonation is methodical, making the Jonathan Lasker-like gameboard of painting appear. The sort of sport of painting.  That these acknowledge. Because anything this incommensurate with elegance is about something other than pleasantries. 

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

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The commitment to drawing, rather the juiced paintings they could be monied as, seems important. "A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them." A drawing seems intended that you understand it. And so when the murky demands of painting enter them, there becomes a confusion of subject. Hazing aesthetic demands. The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production is all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

See too: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

Mark McKnight at Park View/Paul Soto

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The confusion of the machines reading this as "violent content" is almost objective evidence of McKnight's latent own - the algorithm seeing violence, "humanitarian crisis," or corpses in the body of a tree. I mean it is a sensitive photo. Instagram's policies are notoriously opaque, but assuming this was an automated process, the robots choosing violence don't understand corpses or flesh or violence. (Picking a boat out of a lineup of 9 images fools most robots.) Rather they amass a generalized cloud of what violent content looks like. It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. No so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow. 

Kate Spencer Stewart at Park View/Paul Soto

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Slow paintings seem like one of the old white male professor ideas alongside Truth to materials or content or whatever. But we are in fact all scopophiliacs. We like looking at things. And things can be nice, and they can be slow and that doesn't have to be antique. And these all look like water and all feel like sitting by the river watched slow.

“Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

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The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, catalog, cars with more eyes than spiders to take everything and render it. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.


See too:  AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,

Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto

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Somewhere between Richard Rezac, Fecteau, and Kobro, the fantasy of the machine, that thing that serves us. Of course something erotic about that. A table accepts your feet on it, the meat grinder barfs sausage by the mile, generates. A complaint-less subservience, erotic. The microwave, more than reheated food, offered the fantasy of an inch toward paradise. It is a slave. Think of the fetish for horsepower, for ponies under the hood, under your feet, control. The machine sub to its dom. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power. "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation" any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us. They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition, replaced with mystery, potential, of what it could possibly do. For us.


See too: Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

Autumn Ramsey at Park View

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As painter of things, and cat butts sensuous, the combed marbling and sumi-esque, akin Bill Lynch, embed a materialism into the styles assembled, things out of techniques, an odd partitioning of means that, like Amelie von Wulfen, earn small surprises. According to the PR we're supposed to look past these styles "into a realm of circumstances that challenge common beliefs and examine bias"  maybe so we don't call the teary eyed black face painting a black face painting. Perhaps excellently enough its hard to know what to make of the cultural references, and then a blooby green star hovers ambiguously, like a presence to obscure.


Autumn Ramsey at Night Club, Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss, Bill Lynch at Tanya Leighton,  Bill Lynch at White Columns,