Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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The objects of capital, our world, are strange enough. So they become the hieroglyphs of the gallery world, moved into cubes for contemplation. Artists perform the rituals. We glean a ritualized understanding. 

See too: Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Previously:

... a condo's message board holds its neighborhood. There is lives, jobs, wants, wishes, desires attached to a board, fossils of a building accumulating the tacks of people's frontiers, the edges of their presence in the world, leaving notes to the chance of being happened upon, message in a bottle...

Now made a ghost, a negation of. Become a movie screen for all your projections. A tray to hold loss.

".. the forced lapse in reasoning, an artificial unknowing. Like holding your breath to find a profound experience. Conceptual art's interest in semantic rupture has metastasized into a set of materials, tools, into a genre itself. The forms of which are literal enough at this point to be made into a machine. ... We are so adept at pareidolia insight that any object stripped of context we endlessly backfill for. When it doesn't work, the loss affects profundity, that great gulf of something uninterpretable, getting smacked in the back of the head someone saying, 'look, a 6 foot hole.'"

See too: Fiona Connor at Modern Art, Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

Yona Lee at Fine Arts, Sydney

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You can attach anything to anything today. A subway pole becomes a mop, runs plumbing, becomes lamp, attaches a table for when we're all stuck underground. The signs get slippery, confused (the thin difference between a barrier pole or a handrail.) This capitalist surrealism that seems inherent to our age - the general symbolic orders melt to some other demand. Efficiency that we laud capitalism for, the invisible hand pressing everything into everything else, together, the same.


See too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot." a sort of elemental usefulness making art jealous. A directness art fails at, expedience sunk to the mires of its "issues." The signboard tells what it wants: services, sales, solar panel parts. The desires of humans, hope and dreams pinned. Connor's fossilizing of these moments in archival silkscreens ostensibly preserves it for future generation's anthropology. But it's also a sentimentalizing Precious Moments vibe for its preserve, the formaldehyde injection that makes it art, transactable.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Fiona Connor at Modern Art