Megan Marrin at Francis Irv

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You can tell this is conceptual painting because there's a question mark over everyone's head. Which possibly makes it representational painting, at least symbolic. But it another of the artist's re-presentations of a bygone era's aspirational objects looking more like something out of Spirit Halloween. 

Christelle Oyiri at Galerie Buchholz

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Pitchfork just released "The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time." There's all sort of ways to recast memory as historical monument. To upcycle your fandom. Memory concrete. "cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art." How else would "movements that developed outside the dominant models manage to preserve their history?” This is a little more personal, idiosyncratic, than Pitchfork.  It's true, no one needed a Jonathan Taylor Thomas painting to nostalgia the 90s. Appreciate that this artification isn't in the umpteenth rehash of modernism, or painting, mild abstraction. It's just cast as monument, clearly. With some little skull earrings. Perfect for the museum we're rearranging. 

see too: "But maybe his continual painting of hamsters, or making hamsters of his subjects, that cloying adorbz of the neotenic focus-group-tested rodent/celebrity, is what drives the want to wring the necks of those oh so vulnerable and useless. Everyone so cute, loved, like the adored really needed a court painter."

Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth

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Cargo cult archaeologists pretending our white walls auto-study the cultural wreckage placed into it. Cady Noland one of the first of these artist-archeologists. All the invisible crud of culture, handcuffed to its highest showroom. It was mean, and sad, because it was so impotent. This pre-inscribed failure is also when Lazard's own cultural scissoring is best. When the object fails. When a sky illuminates with only replacement sunshine. (Note, art could also be described as replacement sunshine.) When there is tension in the large distinction between hospitality and a hospital - between care and its functionalization - between a band-aid and a mother's compress. This failure is sympathetic because it's the same failure as art to provide any real illumination, only the comfort of its facsimile. 

Ei Arakawa-Nash at Galerie Max Mayer

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The Sam McKinniss means of cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art. This allow the relief of speaking about the world, history, instead of art. For McKinniss the format is painting, here blinkered abstraction. An Artification. Upcycle your fandom. Drop it onto art's island where it will perform its cargo cult duties. We appreciate how earnest and plain this performance is. No sugar coating the sugar coating. This is life, in the stamp of art. With softness and affection. Maybe like yesterday the only way out is through, simply set it plain and pre-fossilized for our living archeology. 

See too: "... at some point, desire itself became "critical." Your teenage bedroom becomes a "site," a "presupposition" of "critical vanity"... Putting cultural touchstones on display you obviously vampire their cultural relation if not their capital, forming a portrait of culture through its blood. Consumption becomes a form of value."