Nina Porter at Theta

(link)

The mad scientist is driven to the fringes to invent something "against god." A monster. To surreptitiously photograph girls by the pool Tichý built a camera out of matchbooks and thread spools. An isolationist spy for his own perversion. A mad scientist's sympathetic intentions, desire, even if their methods are not. You can't take people's parts without asking. The doctor would have required permission from the health department for all that exhumation. That's why you need to build a suspicious backpack. To have a reason for all that gadgetry. Build a peephole into the lab. The voyeured corpse stolen from Étant donnés.

Alexa Hawksworth at Theta

(link)

Giger is hot again so maybe YA book covers - Animorphs via Francis Bacon - seem proper art fodder. A biomorphic carnival. One would wish we could treat illustration as a proper art form - experiments in the commodity aesthetic. Experiments in looking cool as hell. A less disinterested form of connoisseur. "Connected such that our higher faculties have no defenses against. This is not tasteful consideration at a distance but thrall of slumber, dreamed emissions, sick drawings."

Illustratively sick: Kennedy Morgan at Delaplane and Cushion Works, Kye Christensen-Knowles at LOMEX

Elizabeth Englander at Theta & Tahnee Lonsdale at Night Gallery

(Theta, Night)

At one end you have the trash reassembling to totem and at the other end the figure shredded into composition. They meet at the same point, our expectations of art, an object as cultural phantasm, cultural picasso. 

Omari Douglin at Theta

(link)

Blow up the pages of adolescent sketchbooks and access the id. Puberty in painting. The remains of a cultural explosion, TNT sears the shadows of coyotes into the walls our skulls. This is the imprint of culture, the massive hot branding of our brains. As you get older the projections get bigger, the canvas becomes a better receptacle.