Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

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Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Shapes assembled resemble a basset hound, the artist's sculptures, partially digested. There is analogy to be made: exchanging the smooth muscle tube for linear time and the sculptor for an intestinal tract. Freed from the striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor turns to the open touch of just rubbing, frottage with the inanimate until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. The basset hound even looks like a partially digested dog.


See too: Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

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The preponderance of overly tasteful paintings today is, in one sense, critically justified through its “reexamination” of modernism, particularly looking towards the forgotten’s more decorative tendencies, Delauney, Munch, Jawlensky, Hantai. And, coming out the mid-late 2000’s “indexicality” boom, in which every brushstroke was quotation and the artist’s hands removed for the theft - lost in the revolution of printmaking as painting - painting today still carries viewers' heads echoing this skepticism, and thus benefits: what was once derivative and gentle is now critical. It helps if you can carry this baggage out of your school.
The most interesting thing about Prekop’s paintings is the desire for the return of his hands, while looking not. The paintings do offer a little more in person, a use of transparency of linen, puzzles of layers, etc. In reproduction the visual unfolding of it’s making - the steps of what might-be but don’t-look-like a screenprint - are lost, the cleverness gone and the predominance of its nice-design packages is all one is left with, just how unbelievably tasteful these paintings today are.