“Crumple” at VIN VIN

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A sort of paganism that pervades. In this exhibition and elsewhere, we smear paint, assemble objects, to arrange something like "meaning." A like-meaning, or an affect of it. A yule pole for every occasion. 

See too: Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Dortmunder Kunstverein

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We use the language of fetishes because they are displays of alternative sensitivities, symptomatic expressions of a culture. Desires transferred, rerouted into others. Metal bars as alternatives to comfortable arms, steel tubing as both safety and repression, of course someone is going to develop some odd affinities toward it, would want it to restrain some silken flesh. The bondage community has long been attuned to black leather and clean skin. Art premised on its cultural associates, the feminine and flesh, WWII paratroopers drifting through the heavens, their death: Art's survival on the ability to innuendo itself. A material we call stainless. Instead like tofu absorbs the flavors of everything.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Hannah Hoffman

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Detail: Elaine Cameron-Weir, FOR MAKE ADMIT THIS VOIDE, 2017, Rubber jacket, leather, orthopedic jaw fixation hardware, stainless steel, amber

New Sex-assemblage - barnacling fetishes, totems, trends for the dental, bondage leather, medieval role-play. Accumulates objects operating sublingual, registers of the dog-whistle objects that affect all the tools of kink, advertisements, and Dwell, touch you in your feels, pseudo-witchcraft creating concoctions of objects emotional, touching us.


see too:  Camille Blatrix at Wattis, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles

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"snake with sexual interest in own tail,"describing an onanistic ouroboros, oneself as sex object, bent in half autoerotically, folded in a mirror we devour ourselves, reflected in the blue light of narcissus's new glass pond, in our hands cupped holding ourself scrolling up and down vigorously on our electrically charged glass skinned self, in cupped bivalves on half shell the mouthfeel of genitals, with salt, lemon and myrrh. In a techno-seance eliciting the same sexiness muscles cars once did, a sexual response. In Pier Paolo Calzolari, who also used clams and neon, in an impoverished art not quite meeting the new alchemical conjuring of the spirituality we connect to the iPhone. "In using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects’ brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery."


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

“Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner



Assemblage surrealism 2.0
The fallout of semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova* of the 00’s assemblage, Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al, the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. A post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole mandala phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

But so look see, at Rachel Uffner, as the next generation assembles, re-erect, no longer a strange spiritualism in letting the markets speak their hallucinations, but primordial constructions in its own. Still highly surrealist in its mashing of lobster- biology with tele-electronics in the continuously re-imagined sphere of bio-tech. Future's frogs in glass housing shan't live alone. The Bivalve shell rises, the new theory of design, Rough and smooth, coarse and erotic. The oyster like a hand made to hold the Apple product, what a perfect symbol for our biomechanical cybernetics. The limits of the hard body turning over into soft. Look at us evolve to our newfound worlds underwater. Do we really think a PowerRanger would own Elad Lassry?.

*so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's
precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space
and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance
between viewer and object is always already filled up and
occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds
ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In
order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its
timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of
apearances. - Kelsey on Harrison’s semio-manicism.