Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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The objects of capital, our world, are strange enough. So they become the hieroglyphs of the gallery world, moved into cubes for contemplation. Artists perform the rituals. We glean a ritualized understanding. 

See too: Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

Inga Danysz at Sydney, Sydney

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Been seeing a lot of slumping glass lately. I can't even think of all who, Kate Newby, Kelly Akashi, but others unremembered. Jean-Luc Moulène, etc. Is that that glasswork is a craft return, or does glass have particular attributes. Glinty. Liquid jewel? The firm/soft thing? Maybe why Torbjorn Rodland took a photo of a penis behind melt glass. To desumblimate its soft allure? A chair is a just an innuendo for a body. 

Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Previously:

... a condo's message board holds its neighborhood. There is lives, jobs, wants, wishes, desires attached to a board, fossils of a building accumulating the tacks of people's frontiers, the edges of their presence in the world, leaving notes to the chance of being happened upon, message in a bottle...

Now made a ghost, a negation of. Become a movie screen for all your projections. A tray to hold loss.

".. the forced lapse in reasoning, an artificial unknowing. Like holding your breath to find a profound experience. Conceptual art's interest in semantic rupture has metastasized into a set of materials, tools, into a genre itself. The forms of which are literal enough at this point to be made into a machine. ... We are so adept at pareidolia insight that any object stripped of context we endlessly backfill for. When it doesn't work, the loss affects profundity, that great gulf of something uninterpretable, getting smacked in the back of the head someone saying, 'look, a 6 foot hole.'"

See too: Fiona Connor at Modern Art, Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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You can attach anything to anything today. A subway pole becomes a mop, runs plumbing, becomes lamp, attaches a table for when we're all stuck underground. The signs get slippery, confused (the thin difference between a barrier pole or a handrail.) This capitalist surrealism that seems inherent to our age - the general symbolic orders melt to some other demand. Efficiency that we laud capitalism for, the invisible hand pressing everything into everything else, together, the same.


See too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot." a sort of elemental usefulness making art jealous. A directness art fails at, expedience sunk to the mires of its "issues." The signboard tells what it wants: services, sales, solar panel parts. The desires of humans, hope and dreams pinned. Connor's fossilizing of these moments in archival silkscreens ostensibly preserves it for future generation's anthropology. But it's also a sentimentalizing Precious Moments vibe for its preserve, the formaldehyde injection that makes it art, transactable.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Fiona Connor at Modern Art

Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Looking for the ghost in the machine we instead find the designer. We treat objects as if they are magic, acting like a cargo cult, arranging the droppings of the industrial gods like paganists worshipping more technically advanced nations. We place their refuse in our altars. A hole we are to be fed into in trash can colors absorbing into the urban landscape. Objects are designed to affect us, strangely adept at it, advertising like a massive psychologic program and objects are the sediment of it to deploy its energies. But despite every attempt to make technical medical objects sympathetic to us, they are unfortunately cold and this is difficult for us.



See too: Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK

Juliette Blightman at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Like home design catalogs presenting the life we could live, the gallery displays an open door breeze, the sentimentality of trying to maintain, hold, a night between friends that a playlist remembers. Your life could be better the catalog says, if only you could imagine it as mine. The elegiac quality is the loss.

“2021” at Sydney

“2021” at Sydney

The decrepit and artifactual, pieces, there's something lovely forlorn about a single butt of trash like a rose. Good trash will bloom in the sun, wilt in the rain. We aspire to be like its emptiness, it vindicates our cities, we can see the whole world like a lens through the one discarded in the gutter. Trash reflects us, because we're better at deciphering ruins than cultures.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

“Every Day I Make My Way” at Minerva

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Photography may be comprised of the accident, but its an accident captured and cast in the glass of its image; there is nothing more horribly crystallinely concrete than a photograph, "an object which virtually produces itself." Chetrit's video shows its molten form, the slow liquid flow of "photography"'s staging, strung and malleable in its cheesy goo before cooling into its hard representation of us. Photography's glass found perfect deployment in advertising and the commodity who craved its ability to deliver a glass-like surface of perfection that even then Barthes, Benjamin and Sontag were, it's possible to believe, already reacting to then in their nostalgic interest in photography's yellowing, like now pretty much every photographer today not necessarily trying to break the glass, at least looking to place a sticker on it or find some odd way to warm its domination of us, with a filter say, the image.


See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, Tony Conrad's Glass