Hiromi Nakatsugawa at Franz Kaka

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The roiling surface of Solaris. "We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors." This is the function of the inkblot planet, returning in your reflection something in the seaweed beneath surface, it is only you. This is why painting is incredibly popular. 

Paulo Nazareth at Mendes Wood DM & Pivô & The Power Plant

(Mendes Wood DM, Pivo, The Power Plant)

An exotic image for sale. That Nazareth is aware. But unsure what level of duplicity we've gotten off on. Intentionally meeting expectations of the [x] artist. There's too many tropes at play. Enduro walks, cardboard signs, blanket sales, crusty bricks and tin cans, THE CITY, wove leaf hats, cruddy nice paintings. Its got all the tropes. AlysPopeLOrozcoHammonsKuriMendietaCruzvillegasEtal. Maybe the closest is AI Weiwei, who exchange an understanding of politics for an understanding of art. An understanding the artist. Or, perhaps some elaborate triple agent irony? We knowing that he knows that they don't care.

Jorian Charlton at Cooper Cole

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Photography's harvest of youth, an ongoing thread:  Robert Kulisek at VI VII, Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Sean Patrick Watters at Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document, Michael Smith at Richard Telles, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

That said, a good press release gives pause. A firmness invokes disagreement, opening. What is a photography agreeable between model and maker. Between society and art. Orchid become wasp. Is this possible? Not photography only as extraction for others. A model may contort themselves to the desire of camera, but ostensibly photographer bends too. A handshake between them in the form of a photograph. 

Johnny Pootoogook at Daniel Faria Gallery

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Jesus. While painting decorates its subject, drawing is the schematic for its construction inside your head. Imagination, where the image blooms, your brain the fertile garden that grows what exactly is "The Rose."

Miriam Cahn at The Power Plant

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Painting today is made to hang well behind desks. Blame Gerhard Richter "powerful" benign abstraction. Safe. The beautiful paintings Cahn's can't really be mistaken for. Color instead a cruelty. Chicken plucked flesh. An acid replacing lipstick. There is too much content, unmistakeable, with an ambiguous antagonist. Is that birth going well? is the smiley faced sex? The general moments of happiness (sex, handjobs, infants) instead unsafe. This all sounds so direly over-the-top, so excessive. But maybe that's why it works. There's no couching it. No excuse to hang well over you.

Howie Tsui at The Power Plant

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There's no actual video included but eventually institutions will provide so much documentation you'll can assemble the film yourself, frame by frame, just like the artist, fill the missing pieces with frog DNA, reading between the lines, enough lines, eventually document a blank screen to create your own projector, eventually you will be the artist.

Tau Lewis at Cooper Cole

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Irrupt your desire into space. "meant to resemble a light-filled womb. ... sculptural textiles reflect on non-gendered motherhood and gardens as sources of knowledge and growth. ...tells a story of joy, freedom, and triumphant love." Scraps rearranged to manifest new reality. That we are imagining. We used to think the gallery provided critique, but we'll take fantasy, a different world.

See too: Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Marguerite Humeau at Clearing, Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant, 

Kate Newby at Cooper Cole

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Detail views. An enforced sight, enforced noticing. An almost moral underpin, asking for sight, a penance in attention.


see too: Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

Group Show at Cooper Cole

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Could you grow grass with the light of a projector? Could you grow flowers? (Doubtful this hasn't been attempted.) wonder at the total global carbon footprint of currently looping projectors. of anything. Doesn't projecting images of water on dry earth feel apt our world? Our thirst quenched with effect. Endless incantation against, our prayer set to loop.

ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

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"...made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist's hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist's hands are everywhere. [...] the tactile memory of garcia's hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can't touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?"

a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass. Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries & Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama

(Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries, Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama)

We aren't normally delivered the fantastical in such explicit forms. That tasteful hint of surreality mirroring our own world feeling deformed, malleable to invisible hands. Things feel pretty strange these days, so much so that fantasy surrealism almost feels quaint, safe. A big ornament in the sky feels relatively benign in that scientists - as a means to cool our planet - are researching global scale "stratospheric aerosol injections" of sulphuric acid. Spraying 5 million tons of acid into the sky as serious funded research, the world has become a cartoon where the actors wields huge mallets, and the world bends like goo to their violence.

Kandis Williams at Cooper Cole

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"especially in the art world where we have so many unlanguaged connections to the images of empire. [Those images are] the forms and fragments of Platonic ideals that now serve as our perceptual tools."

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Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, it's a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

“Symbolisms” at Cooper Cole

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Walls evaporate in backgrounds tuned to pornographic white, shadowless, paintings and sculptures float in the fog, as though tossed in the air, into the html space they drift, gallery neutrality moving ever closer to the anywhere/everywhere of globalized affairs. Galleries were the slow form of the internet: a networked system for image trade. CAD is the new silk road, the trade route of social fabrics. 

The "willfully retrograde" of gallery logistics, still shipping images across seas to see them sprout in back in the internet's ether, and of this exhibition's stated rose-colored eyes for a past long passed it, oddly, framed in the context of reactionary politics' goosechasing for a golden age, exemplified well in most of the work here. But the surrealist assimilation of Santiago de Paoli seem the most futuristic despite their decrepitude.