Zarouhie Abdalian at Clifton Benevento

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Parts and pieces, fragments, inherently interesting in that they narrativize themselves, project their story as artifacts of it. We automatically read the objects as parts of a whole that they withhold telling. A story that doesn't tell itself, but the parts limn this possible whole and the tension in our inability to piece it perfectly creates a mistrust, mystery. Abdalian's "storytelling" makes art's metaphorical viewer as detective a sort of literal mode in a setting for them. The mis-en-scene carries the narrative. Artforum thought it was about gentrification.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

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For Jane Bennett the pathologic hoarder expresses a heightened sensitivity to the world of objects, not some vestigial evolutionary trait gone haywire post-scarcity.  For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3, in which the cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, kept indefinitely and experienced with connection. And perhaps the mass production doll replacing the handmade one coincides with a turn from paganist expression to materialist hoarding expression. Anyway, Spaysky, who feels something towards garbage, attempts smuggling their components out of the trash. The "warm" items of refuse attempt their own repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. Like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus and painted to escape the prying eyes of men seeking to ruin them, Spaysky recasts the trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love.


See too: Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento

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Let’s not make anything of the Instagram origins conceptual juicing. Beavers’ shift from edging foodporn to straight porno-esque, the nails, lips, decommissioned musculature of engines, the post-coital stub, phallic carving exposing the more explicitly latent. Pulling from the world’s vast reserve of images made to speak about its desires. Let’s not make much of the countless men sculpting countless phallus. Rounding the lips express the touch, cuuuuuurves, till the last one looks like a butthole. puckered. None of Instagrams perfect white lighting, everything appearing soaked in ink, coated in oil. The dry scrapping of the brush around the curves. Trippy in the battle of discerning what is relief and illusion in image.

See too: Gina Beavers at Retrospective