Scott Benzel at Phase Gallery

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A show named after the ancient ways of mirror gazing. As a means to communicate with spirits. What do you see reflected in a black mirror? A perfect analogy for art. Our apophenia on overdrive. What do you see in the void? How does your brain make sense in noise? From meaninglessness? We make art, see a face in toast, a spirit in rock. All of art is laboratory of it. Prisoner's cinema.

See too: "On Kawara's One Million Years versus here's dice roll over a Million Random Digits. ... art becomes the casino of picking digits, making meaning, manufacturing rarity."

Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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How far these painting seems. It enhances their fog, an increase in atmosphere between you and subject like rain. Yes, it's the same photographic distance as say Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel, but these recede even further, the fabrics imbibe their melting ice cream, slurping them into the canvas an impenetrable window away.

David Benjamin Sherry at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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From the success af Klint on shopping bags to the dredging styles of the Santa Fe transcendentalists - there's something in the air wanting spirit. But you can't mention god in a press release. (The word spirituality was only recently allowed back in the gates.) So the landscape is a neutral country, a naturalism speaking to god with alibi of the secular. But we want belief in more. A common side effect of nervous time. We want the landscape rendered as spectral presence, to see safety in the sharp corners of the world commanded hazard-yellow by higher powers. Now beg for the higher powers Polke once provided.  

Emma Reyes at Crèvecoeur

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The point is, give your inkblot a shape. Let the shape sweat out something to be seen. Not to interminably serialize a single spilled question mark. There is something to be seen here. In the sweating flesh of a tomato jacuzzi. We don't know what it is but it is to be seen.

See too: inkblot

Dean Sameshima at Good or Trash

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"Anonymous" spinning a literary riff on the signifier/signified. The homosexual is undepicted, they are of course anonymous. The label points to but not any particular one. But the anonymous label moves us away from the description and toward its potential depicted as a question already presupposed. Who is the homosexual? What happened on Kawara's date? Who is CAWD? This rupture in the signifier/-fied is the imaginative potential. This is the poetic, the nostalgia. A promised object in losing, already lost. The double stamp on the homosexual as "anonymous" dooms them - you will not receive them back, they are lost to time.

Matti Braun at BQ

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What you thought were some lovely glass is instead a cruel deployment of cultural signifiers. Report to the text for your education. The big reveal, the pleasance is actually "meaning."  

 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage