Georgina Treviño at Embajada

(link)

Both Rachel Harrison and the 00's hipster were responding to the shopping mall, which had exploded, semiotically, into chaos of sign systems. A tweety bird tee, Louis Vuitton boots, and a struggle mustache - and everyone was confounded. It was the aughts, you were intended to adhere to the rules that kept meaning rigid, in place. We all performed the ritual of dress to keep meaning ordered. Until someone didn't. The horse girl and the whale tail merged. Post this semio-apocalypse everyone was left scrambling in the detritus to assemble totems, and we had a lot of cargo cult art in the 2010s. Now we've sifted the rubble and collected enough signs we've agreed have sentiment that the shopping mall is consecrated as jewelry of itself - cast in remembrance, the chaos of surface, symbol, nostalgia embedded within a silver relic. The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

Elza Sīle at Embajada

(link)

Our detritus starts to congeal again a painting. Rachel Harrison blew up the mall, the cargo cult aftermath of 00's and 10's left the Lieskian ontologists with totemic yard sales grasping at rubble's meaning, and now in the ruin and filth.. new life? Protozoa animism? Shrines to the stuf accumulating in our veins. 

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Peter Fend at Embajada

(link)

Protest art is hot right now, museum footage turned over to it with populist ease. Who doesn't want to take down Elon Musk, the cartoon villain extraordinaire who painted himself green to hide the robotic machination of his hyper-capitalism, neoliberal as savior. Musk is dolt. It feels good to curse him. It feels good to send out the rhetorical curses of the protest sign's curtness. The retort of his loyal followers, "what have you done to compete?" always coming with the implicit understanding that one wants to do something, and further that one wants to do something that panders to markets deeming it marketable. How can one invest in getting Musk to stop? To take a break. How could we invest in shutting off the wheels for a day, and we could all go outside. The internet shuttered. The lights dimmed, the rare earths would stop being mined, iPhones depleting their charges, and the capital would be stored in whatever vaults they now use for dust. The fossils we burn as fuel could be temporarily cooled. We could stand blinkered at the sun we haven't seen. For a while, we could erect giant balloons, for the firefighters to watch the world be set afire. It feels good to take down, to erect fingers.