Past: Olga Balema

"images, unable to be tactile, to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. " "Bodies that photograph well." "Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight"
"over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists"

"the demands for artwork, like pornography, to photograph well... Now, here a show that doesn't photograph well. Instead, like tires danced through by hulking men on tiptoes, your body staged in tripwires. Connections others have made to the history of empty galleries miss the fact that A, the gallery is full of things and B, empty galleries do not require such care where you step. (The read of "empty" seems, again, evidence of our perception now dominated by sight rather than haptic presence, proprioception, etc.) ... This is another means of making the body appear, nervous, a perhaps long theme of Balema, but without resort to the "excess body", the biomorphic, lumpy, intestinal. ..."

Full: Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Olga Balema at High Art (2), Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

John Lindell at Corvi-Mora

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There are just certain curves that imply. That we will relate to. Not tell mom about. "The most direct rules of inanimate erotics are first- that the object be becoming flesh, and second exemplifying the curve of inside into out. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into... an expression of explicit vulnerability. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. ... but the transitional state of the objects isn't so much a becoming-subject of the abject, but instead a faint pubescence of gender, objects just arriving at a split, a fork budding a semblance of female or male possibility..."

Sophie Reinhold at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Aporia" industrializes the poetic - it is the rupture in understanding, the internal disjunction, a preventative against relieving meaning its burden. You read a sentence, understand it and move on. But the poetic aporia of a poem's line provides no conclusion. This is the life support of art, meaning eternally suspended from conclusive death. Ever further "meaning," ever longer wall texts. But as we've gotten better at corralling interpretations, butterfly pinning beauty to theory - the artist must gather from further ends in the fields of elusivity. Eventually the canyon becomes large enough and field once again becomes meaningless and we get to enjoy flowers again. Sink into the bubble's bath.

"...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning": Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Past: Maggie Lee

"coolness is an affect ...  the subject expresses through the grate of social coding, is its pathos. [...] self-expression immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. 'Gigi is me in 2006.' A teenage self-conciousness..."

"The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment."

Read Full: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts, Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

 Past: Shana Moulton

"humor in searching for spiritual value in commodic life ... juxtaposed with the day's small tragedy turning over a can of beans to read its ingredients"

"endless mockery of her subject's desire to appear ... bullying our desire for comfort in recognition .... somberly kicking us when we're down with a medical donut strapped to our ass"

"You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect: the point was the power was inside you all along... The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising."

"That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work."

Click full: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

 Past: Hana Miletić 

"(Because knitting is so laboriously outmoded it can only be care, i.e. not capitalism, more love hours than can ever be repaid, etc. Knitting is the province of excess time, and attention, which translates to -anticapitalist- care)"

"...that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.

Full: Notes on Stitches, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma

Past: Ghislaine Leung

"...the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives."

"...increasing modern "miracle" conveniences and the then latest "smart objects" is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. The fear of our kitchen as a mold. Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores.  You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing "THE BOSS." Whether or not highlighting these cultural walls with a gloss is helpful, it does make for good scary. "

"Important:  a meaning not generally associated, a meaning dissociated. 'an emotional response repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary' causes desensitization. 'WELCOME'"


Read full: Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart, Ghislaine Leung at Museum Abteiberg