Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

(link)

Rantanen's torturing robotic animals, enacting their death throes, recall watching, young children, neighborhood kids, pressing electrodes to the white of a frog's belly, hand-cranking current to the animal's body tightening, rigid in convulsion, seize, immobile, repeatedly, until the frog was permanently immobile and thrown overhand back to the pond, one of three markers of sociopathic behavior, the frog in the air.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu,

Jessica Diamond at Team (bungalow)

(link)

Reading is like relinquishing control of thought to an author's temporary marionetting of yours. How odd that my words voice in your head. It is a base human disposition to "read" our environment, to make sense of our surroundings, and advertising takes advantage: a byline appears and before you can stop yourself it is read, allowed briefly to control you, its message passed, its transaction complete, and its sign expended.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein

Margaret Lee at Team

(Margaret Lee at Team)

From Buren’s stripes previously turned polka dots and Zobernig’s banality turned to silver, Lee’s interest in “transforming the act of presentation into a subject unto itself” makes for a semi-reflexive nondescript jewelry form of institutional crit: so banal one must wonder about them. References so watered down to make tastes so bland it becomes impossible to discern where the appropriation even lay. Like the p-zombie, it becomes impossible to discern those mindless forms of art and the forms that mine the them. Zobernig was able to able to make funny the surprise of wresting yet one more form of banality out of saturated markets of it, a new runner in a race of weak-tea genericism as critically appropriate.

See too : Heimo Zobernig - Petzel,  Krupp, MUDAM