Bradley Ertaskiran [Bunker] at Contemporary Art Daily

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It's generally frowned upon, the extolling/photography of your own bellybutton. Navel-gazing's "self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself or a single issue, at the expense of a wider view."

But when has art ever been above its own self-aggrandizement, mirrored-auto-pleasure. (We've practically turned that itself into an art.) (This the obvious fallout of institutional critique.) The mirror becomes shinier, more pixels added, until someday hopefully the functions themselves become visible. We ascribe great power to a room that is the ostensible factory of our meaning. Painful to find to only rooms. Go into a church and find the basement's folding tables, plastic conference rooms for the glory of God. They are but rooms. The phantasm of nothingness. 

Ala Bourdieu, the real consecration is getting people to believe. 

See too: REDCAT at Contemporary Art Daily

Howie Tsui at The Power Plant

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There's no actual video included but eventually institutions will provide so much documentation you'll can assemble the film yourself, frame by frame, just like the artist, fill the missing pieces with frog DNA, reading between the lines, enough lines, eventually document a blank screen to create your own projector, eventually you will be the artist.

Tau Lewis at Cooper Cole

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Irrupt your desire into space. "meant to resemble a light-filled womb. ... sculptural textiles reflect on non-gendered motherhood and gardens as sources of knowledge and growth. ...tells a story of joy, freedom, and triumphant love." Scraps rearranged to manifest new reality. That we are imagining. We used to think the gallery provided critique, but we'll take fantasy, a different world.

See too: Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Marguerite Humeau at Clearing, Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant, 

Nicolas Grenier at Bradley Ertaskiran

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Infographics given 70s gloss, retro and surreal. We like information, we've basically been evolutionarily programmed to find its stimulating, it feels like meaning, and given nostalgia's candy coating. This painting shows a scene from the new Indiana Jones where Jones uses the Staff of Ra to reveal a map on of the interior of Ed Ruscha's The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire before it sinks into the tar pits beneath Zumthor's black eyesore, all illuminated by a Kanye/Turrell floating stage.

See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Orion Martin at Bodega, Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert,

Kate Newby at Cooper Cole

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Detail views. An enforced sight, enforced noticing. An almost moral underpin, asking for sight, a penance in attention.


see too: Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

Group Show at Cooper Cole

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Could you grow grass with the light of a projector? Could you grow flowers? (Doubtful this hasn't been attempted.) wonder at the total global carbon footprint of currently looping projectors. of anything. Doesn't projecting images of water on dry earth feel apt our world? Our thirst quenched with effect. Endless incantation against, our prayer set to loop.

Rebecca Brewer, Rochelle Goldberg at Oakville Galleries

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our desire for a materiality comes at the hands of world we increasingly do not touch. And so art must become a hyperstimulus; art must make us, perverts of novelty, feel something through glass, by sight, because our hands have been removed to a world we touch only through electrified track pads, through eyes, through a world like advertisement. And art, for all its self-segregation, increasingly must compete with entirety of visual diaspora, entering into mass cultural networks, instagram and webpages becoming its channels, same as all the other. The gloss of Artforum is now a forlorn beacon in comparison. How does art compel belief in its higher order. We now compete with actual images of dead oiled fish. Art excesses itself, crusts, proofs its real.

ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

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"...made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist's hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist's hands are everywhere. [...] the tactile memory of garcia's hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can't touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?"

a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass. Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries & Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama

(Valérie Blass at Oakville Galleries, Atsushi Fukui at Tomio Koyama)

We aren't normally delivered the fantastical in such explicit forms. That tasteful hint of surreality mirroring our own world feeling deformed, malleable to invisible hands. Things feel pretty strange these days, so much so that fantasy surrealism almost feels quaint, safe. A big ornament in the sky feels relatively benign in that scientists - as a means to cool our planet - are researching global scale "stratospheric aerosol injections" of sulphuric acid. Spraying 5 million tons of acid into the sky as serious funded research, the world has become a cartoon where the actors wields huge mallets, and the world bends like goo to their violence.

Kandis Williams at Cooper Cole

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"especially in the art world where we have so many unlanguaged connections to the images of empire. [Those images are] the forms and fragments of Platonic ideals that now serve as our perceptual tools."

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Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, it's a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

“Symbolisms” at Cooper Cole

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Walls evaporate in backgrounds tuned to pornographic white, shadowless, paintings and sculptures float in the fog, as though tossed in the air, into the html space they drift, gallery neutrality moving ever closer to the anywhere/everywhere of globalized affairs. Galleries were the slow form of the internet: a networked system for image trade. CAD is the new silk road, the trade route of social fabrics. 

The "willfully retrograde" of gallery logistics, still shipping images across seas to see them sprout in back in the internet's ether, and of this exhibition's stated rose-colored eyes for a past long passed it, oddly, framed in the context of reactionary politics' goosechasing for a golden age, exemplified well in most of the work here. But the surrealist assimilation of Santiago de Paoli seem the most futuristic despite their decrepitude.

Liz Magor at Catriona Jeffries

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Tomorrow, April 23rd, 2016, there is an Estate Sale at 1344 Lambert Cir in Lafayette, CO. A pause before an objects moment in the world is scrubbed. Green Rayon pantsuits laid out on floral polyester bedspread. Ornately bezeled mirrors. Rusting jewelry in teal ceramic clam shells. A deflated donut cushion. Faint Naphthalene smells. Black velcro shoes. Frames with their contents removed. Objects whose sentiments evaporate along with the those who left them to become voids of that sentiment. Staged for a purgatorial display between vintage reincarnation and garbage. Threshold worlds. The trivial difference between a trash box and moving. And this last transitional moment Magor extends indefinitely, embalmed to pay respects, injected with formaldehyde to plasticize body without warmth.


See too: Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak



The vital-materialism that undergirds this work is premised on a quasi-spiritual belief of an essential warmth of used materials, as if waste and trash contained some quality that shrink-wrapped plungers from Walmart don’t, which is sort of true but also the great lie of Capitalism, as if these objects spontaneously-manifested on store shelves, as if Apple laptops weren't assembled by sweating hands of low wage workers from materials of rare earth, mined in darkness by slaves paid even less. Laptops don’t look dirty, but they are the waste of the same system that installs factory suicide nets.

Ron Terada at Catriona Jeffries



Like Richter’s cold representation, Terada’s re-presentation, painting, of Goldstein’s bio is hollowing, emptying, left with the bones of pathos emerged from the evacutation of Goldstein’s overt romanticism. The doubling splits the experience between finding yourself engaged reading Goldstein’s text and remembering that you are looking at paintings of the text, once removed. The overlay of contextual flippage - reminiscent of Levine/Lawler’s invitations to “their” presentation of a ballet that wasn’t - never attempts to become the Quixote, but often finds the two text-surfaces collapsing to touch, as when Goldstein speaks of appropriation, or the necessitude of 2-d paintings for artworld seriousness which we find ourselves looking at, we find the projects merging, reflected in the other, an appropriated subject that begins talking back, almost self-aware, as if Goldstein himself was aware that the personality that preceded him would one day warrant this, this Kosuth like defining of contextual baggage.