Beaux Mendes at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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In the inky pool of the forest we have a press release seeing Heidegger, Hell, Nazis, Jews, home, Grandmothers, Rabbis, Orthodoxy. This is the power of the inkblot:

In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Dressing up painting in bondage femme, kinda fun, like when my cousins dressed their younger brother up in a big pink dress to be paraded around the family gathering, photographed, and be mocked for years - there's something essentialist about the fun, a criticism leveled at Judy Chicago who also used the car as a phallus to be semantically tortured - there's fun in dress up, the critique will go on for decades, "Hey painting remember when we dressed you up as a girl?"

Cay Bahnmiller at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Unintentionally, our preservation of artist's lives come to resemble Thek's meat boxes. Most moving: tragedy as the post-mortem of life cut up and pieced out into sterile containers, a dead butterflies, we marvel at creation only god could create. Now separate from. Who do we pay alms to here? Science cannot adequately describe the natural world as it is lived, there is a disjunction between life and its evidence, autopsy. 

Olga Balema, Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Like Fred Sandback from hell. Not the transcendent floating, but ropes tying you to floor, your immanence: "To dwell, remain" on this bitch of an Earth. It's "important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame."

"It wasn’t that group of late Rembrandt self-portraits. It was their unrestored frames. Dull and dusty and cracked in the corners, they were the materialization of the age and poverty worn on the represented faces, of the humanity reflected in the represented eyes. The frames provided those poor, passive pictures with a haven from the inhuman grandeur of the museum’s imperial architecture, held them in their own history—not a history of masterpieces but the history of lived life. They enacted a kind of resistance that the paintings themselves couldn’t mount, being as they were so contained by that architecture and all it represented. The waitress in the café on the museum’s second floor, where I took refuge behind a massive marble column, sobbing, had obviously seen this before. She sat me down and administered Vienna’s other famous cure: a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Sacher torte. She wouldn’t let me pay."

 Or: The yellow preventative against conceptualism. 

 

Ser Serpas at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Americans spent the last two years tearing down monuments, so there is catharsis here in what was always implicit then, that our ideals were mostly trash anyway. So erect now what you previously pretended didn't. As important as land acknowledgements, a song to the tune of Kanye West's Runaway, "Let's have a toast for the douchebags." Let's have a toast to the trash hole. A toast to IKEA elegance, the shelf that everyone I know has. A toast to waste, yours. 

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Gedi Sibony, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Ser Serpas

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Images latent in our expectations. "complicating the minimalist mantra of what you see is what you see, because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats in car beginning to look like the lap of a tanned, taught, naked man."
Our products look like sexual objects.


See too: Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Jana Euler at dépendance,