Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolami

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Magenta doesn't exist in the natural spectrum. It is an extra-perceptual color, an artifact resulting from our eye's biological structure of rods and cones attempting to interpret a mixtures of reds and blues. Part of a subsection of non-spectral colors, along with imaginary, chimerical, and impossible colors all having no material basis. It isn't difficult to warp with human perception, our bodies create the world we perceive and many physiological rifts in its construction that create whole subgenres of "optical illusions" exploiting these glitches. But the simpler the construction of the exploit - the more minimal its resource to mine such faults - the more distrustful we become of our basic grip on reality, real trippy.

“Äppärät” at Ballroom Marfa

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We hear of videos documenting children attempting to turn magazine pages as if they were iPads, swiping at paper. We hear of these videos as if there are hundreds. As if children had become ethereal. Confusing the materials and their virtual counterparts. A virtual leather now. Your interface hovers over it. Virtual stone. The skeuomorphic book is a reflection of ours under the watery surface of glass. And thus physicality is linked to its virtual counterpart, and the cartoon to our meat. Digital men being cut apart still elicits disgust in the audience. We identify with concepts. Watching the concept of a man self eviscerate was more moving than watching the man. And so somehow sculpture became the way to obliquely talk about the virtual, and HD video the way to talk about the world.

KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

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Genzken the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects; for some time the exhibition had been replacing the singular object exhibited as the base unit of art. And whereas others used this to produce "series," product lines, Genzken extrapolated, used this as a means of acceleration in which speed and production was the communication, attachmenting amassing product and centering production as the point. Genzken's resurgent rush fucking-the-bauhaus predicated interest on their speed. That the production of itself became the product.


see too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner , Ann Craven at Confort Moderne,  Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

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The countless young gay artists that died of AIDs' tragedy made all the more egregious for their shared concern in an abject body, a commonality that occurred at all different points throughout each of their lives, sometimes far before, meaning that it of course had nothing to do with the tragedy that would befall them, but a representation of a common experience among them, of a body merely ill at ease in culture, now looking like a premonition.

Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis

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The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. Rodriguez, against any "signature object", the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.


see too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Mark Grotjhan at Karma

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Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against their elemental usefulness: the crafted integrity of functional objects that nobly perform their service, blue-collarly. Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden.
Grotjahn says as much in in the PR.
And then detached from their context they return to performing the art trope of functionality without purpose, of signifier detached from its -fied, we receive them but there is no hotdog or High Life to manifest. They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.


See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale , Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage , On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Diane Simpson, Lesley Vance at Herald St & Dana Deguilio, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at Lyles & King

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American art's geo-politics are usually microtized to endless laments of their 5 years in the Bronx licensing gentrification's complaint but little spoken in wider terms unless under the rubric of "globalization" accrediting an exoticism as somehow conceptually justifiable. But artistic geo-politics in the middle ground above rent whinging, and questions of "upstate," but then the weird flyover marsh 2,7894 miles in between, and should we buy a building in Detroit and the perennial and eternal decision of L.A., but everyone today definitely fleeing Chicago, except Diane Simpson firmly planted since the 70s. Everyone today, including CAD, Vance, Degulio, Zuckerman-Hartung: all midwest evacuees. And David soon yes you too.
The material question underlying all the choices of final willingness to exchange rent for intangibles is "will we be visible?" Which is generally lessened to, "Will someone trek out to studio visits there?" or forebodingly, "Is there even someone there to make studio visits?"  Art is fueled by the same overhead as any business. New York once contained the largest and loudest broadcast mechanisms fueled by it's nouveau-wealth that made it the all-powered center that has continually lost ground to the flattening distribution means, but you still got to get the show to be able to be moved. Simpson's regional success to led to some powerful coasters including her in strong group shows and now on people's radar. Vance early to L.A. Conspiratorially MZ-H&DD - regional stars of CAD's homeland - finally left Chicago to have their first exhibition featured when a world over CAD was setting up shop under a palm tree.