LaKela Brown at 105 Henry

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Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.

See too:  "...inventories of our blossoming desires ... bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture... a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."

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Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Capitain Petzel

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Certain CAD darlings that just not interest. Repeated, the work is blinkered by a too-bright question, why again? Long ago we were force fed Krebber, now this. Is it foppish noodles there is a taste for? Other artists appear and then, chasm, never again. Others, expected, never arrive. Wrote a Bittenbender review long ago under the expectation, but... no. Instead these backdrops again, again, like the desert of road runner cartoon, duplicated over and over to create the illusion of movement. There isn't movement, only the awaiting of sweet chasm.

Cooper Jacoby at N/A

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Jacoby leaning into the art-as-props-for-sci-fi lets the objects get weirder, their ominousness more camp fun. Less didactic moralism toward a slasher film moralism - doom becomes burlesque, giddy, far more affective, effective. The plot is in the press release/text, the means to spin the ghost story. A movie called Ed 2, Keinholz returns.

 

see too: What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.

Yui Yaegashi at Gallery of The Porto Arts Club

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These too are the pleasure of a bar of soap but carved with an x-acto blade, more surgery than nostalgia. More ikea than film. There's a zen in watching organization, seeing construction. You follow the traces of the rake in the sand garden, allow the mind a meander. The painting equivalent of inventing new forms of that.


see too:  There's value in expunging. Calm, an app that "monetized doing nothing" recently valued at 2 billion dollars. Or Marie Kondo selling products to help you get rid of yours. But more, there's value in making something noble, moral. Vices turned into connoisseurship: it's not alcoholism it's an appreciation for wine, now "natural" wines. And these sell temperance, withholding, from the big jouissance of painting. There's an analogy to certain kinks. Where painting out provides the pleasure. 

The efficiency and craft of them promises if not to organize your home to organize your thoughts... Like the now international Muji, or ikea before it, objects which through their own clever construction promise you their better efficiency. An object that promises to lend you its perfection.

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Luz Carabaño at Hoffman Donahue

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You know how the gentle but complex shapes in worn pastels of used bars of soap are kind of always beautiful? Well imagine those shapes on your porcelain white, you looking down into them, and there a kind of seeing pool, a bar of soap screening faded and out-of-focus vintage film reels. Things you remember and fuzzy. Yeah kinda like that. Your ability to believe in this will mark your reception to. They are but soap, and that's important.