Tolia Astakhishvili at Bonner Kunstverein

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Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.

artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust. 

The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday... 

See too: Simon Fujiwara, The Model, Anna Zacharoff at Kantine, Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

Group Show at Antenna Space

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Thing becomes stuf. Stuf become our thing, a movement, today in art the object is animate with Kristeva flesh, a new form of object that is no longer what you see because what you see is sexually confusing. Why does a couch look like a tanned corpse, why does our/ painting look like a redundant skin. The moment is marked! Question for grad students: Why are we attracted to this? 

See too: Anti-ligature rooms, OUT NOW!

Ser Serpas at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Americans spent the last two years tearing down monuments, so there is catharsis here in what was always implicit then, that our ideals were mostly trash anyway. So erect now what you previously pretended didn't. As important as land acknowledgements, a song to the tune of Kanye West's Runaway, "Let's have a toast for the douchebags." Let's have a toast to the trash hole. A toast to IKEA elegance, the shelf that everyone I know has. A toast to waste, yours. 

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Gedi Sibony, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Ser Serpas

Ser Serpas at Karma International

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Think of milk congealing a skin. Objects, things, threaten a flesh, the hoarder begins to see objects as a living thing, requiring compassion. Canvas like animal skins. "We disavow our excretory bodies  because they are signs of disorder, remindersof the body’s ambiguous limits (its leaking from multiple orifices), and of its ultimate death: 'Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver...'"


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

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Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself that a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.


see too: Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento