Derek Fordjour at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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Maybe its people become decoration, subsumed to the overarching command of DESIGN.
There is a predicament of individuality, as people become uniforms, bodies become composition. Hands up comforts those in power. "The repair and disrepair of the canvas reflects the conditions of abandonment and scarcity present in the artist’s upbringing in the South." The hardship that is reclaimed like wood for collectors.


See too: Purvis Young at James Fuentes, Derek Fordjour at Night Gallery

Deana Lawson at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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And not necessarily treating her subjects kindly, the best light remains Lawson's, the photographic adeptness bending subjects to her. There's plenty of content to be unpacked, the inference: the long legs of prey draped over the predatory face, couch covers torn and exits obstructed. A couch cushion rotated so many times as to expose the seams. Exposing the seams. These are what photographs live for, the construction of a subject, here a person. At least these curtains seem properly adhered. Does this reflect the woman in the photograph or the photographer, a question we answered long ago, but none really take it as such, our inference already passed a judgement. And the photographs are indelible.



See too: Barbara Probst at Monica De Cardenas

Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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Since the Venus of Willendorf's tiny talisman, 30 thousand years of humankind's representing fetishizing and totemizing the maternal.  Leading today to Yuskavage's ambrosial hazes. The feast of the Vanitas' balanced by looming overripeness.  For Yuskavage this balance to its too-sweetness is made through its subtle representational violence against the women depicted, who in attaining this otherworldly ripeness are subject to subtle deformities, missing arms, noses, butts like egg sacs, breasts manipulated by invisible strings, contorted and culled to the desires of a culture. And Everyone wondering whether Nicki's butt is real, furry porn grown from Saturday cartoons given bodies like overinflated water-balloons, and subsections of violent pornography where the maternal is extracted and policed by the programmatic systems of capitalist production, in bondage and milked called human cow -  there is a lot proving our cultural relation to maternal is at least a little fraught, and Yuskavage's paintings are a very tasteful representation of that.


see too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon