Amalia Ulman at Jenny's

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"The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. It would be called a Blue Ocean Strategy... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

This is how you get corrupted. Eventually you get intertwined, which is the same as ensnared, because you know these people. Your opinion is no longer neutral, you bite your tongue, you become a compromised asset. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than self-congratulations. They and movie industry making self-congratulations an unironic artform. This is Empire and its state of mind. Do I fear other's toes? - that's what no one was asking. It's fun to be part of something. The toast and the roast are the same to the professional. It's barely caricature at this point. Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all. 

"A culture, say a magazine or a museum, that can purchase an absolution to the images it wants through an art that gesticulates critique."

See too: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Yuki Kimura at Jenny’s

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A means of physicalizing the otherwise digital nonexistence of video, a brilliant adaption to package and sell televisual color, all the brilliance TVs advertise held in crystal. A slipperiness to Kimura's, objects or photos whose concreteness or hopes for singularity or individuality has a tendency to bleed. Glass which we don't really see but for its reflection, or flaws, it only warbles a world surrounding it, refracts what we put through it. Photos of brandy glasses usually are shot in the white cloud of virtuality to reduce the room, whereas these are built to hold it.


see too: Yuki Kimura at Wattis

Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

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"But I sculpted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" They look like turds, the expellings of capitalist markets finally manifesting all those environmental externalities of the jet-set as piles of shit we imagine their tons of exhaust to be. Like the nightmare of our coming dystopia. Future scrappers, know at least that we could envision our own demise. Alex Israel just announced his complicity with Rimowa luggage days ago with, you guessed it, luggage depicting the clear skies that no air travel is helping. Ironic sure, but not the first: "Olafur Eliasson designs 46 nature-inspired luggage stickers for RIMOWA"  Jenny's has a thing for futurological drear, and CAD is supporting it because they don't all look like this, and all the questions as to why in moments of our dire circumstances further manifest visions of it. "Target fixation" a psychological phenomenon when the "individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object" and the motorcyclist intent on avoiding the guardrail cannot look aways, sends himself flying over it. Or an airplane pilot, understandably.

Max Hooper Schneider at Jenny’s

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Well these sure make our ecological collapse seem beautiful. It surely won't be this ornamented to us. It might be beautiful to someone, but there might not be fish - or any life form - to be beautiful for. Our future might be a large hot acid scorched rock. Our plastic lingerie will dissolve to micro-suffocation devices for fish, our fake jewelry leeching till the water opaque poison. The plankton, studies have recently shown, are dying. They produce the majority of our oxygen.  These are different from Ruin porn, their interest is in fantasizing our future, apocalyptically. Maybe its nihilistic comfort to see the beauty in our suicide. And one be interested in the calculations that now don't seem impossible, what it would take, scientifically, to rain blood. The recipe as such:

"Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquiescence"

Morag Keil at Jenny’s

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Possibly the culmination of Jenny's program towards rendering the cloying dread of banality's final boss. It's not so much empty as toneless. Thus the hollow soundtrack. While at one end there's the renderstenialists whose tonal overabundance manicizes, say RoseHenrotProuvostAtkinsWolfson, at the other, this affectlessness of "clean" objects scrubbed to that everyday clean feeling of pleasurelessness. Think just how much tone you're subjected to in so much current art strapped into a chair, how well this show conjures without it. Banality isn't a word strong enough. Those particular door handles, the defining feature of cheap mass apartments. Nettel once left the dirty dishes out and has Keil washed them, put them away behind that brown door,  in each others apartments for their collaboration, "The Fascism of Everyday Life" forcing day to day drudgery's recognition, the things we care to forget, every one of us socialists but as roommates we don't share hot-sauce.

""Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," said the lead researcher. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.""

Our brains are haywired continuously, forced to deal with frizzing nonsense, cheap dishes and smart tvs, that old joke: "My work is inspired by [...] paintings so boring the human mind is incapable of remembering them, creating the impression that you are seeing them for the first time, everytime." Daily amnesia of us trying to remember our lives.



See too: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

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PR: "The prevalence of icons, symbols, and glyphs across the screen interfaces interacted with on a daily basis, and their basic shorthand command work equivalent to the first steps of written language. To communicate, at a glance, tallies of river cargo hauled on the Euphrates (c. 3100 BC), memorable recordings of mastodon hunts and campfires, what gets attention on the App Store."

Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." Walczak has proven for some time now, with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.

Gili Tal at Jenny’s

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The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers, a lightness mimicking advertising's own getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation: even that incessant gadfly of PR fodder, the flaneur - ever abused privileger of every artist's cockamamie tourism - is put to place as another symptom of globalized identity, flighting only over the surfaces of exchange and capital. Objects terrifyingly depressing.

Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s

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Hard not read in terms of Malouf's Real Fine friend Jana Euler. For Instance. Malouf's infringing inhabitation of stylistic churn mentioned in an RFA PR 5 years ago: "Contemporary Art’s Circulation as an operable form of life and its android engagement of "Hipster" art forms, which could characterize a vast array of artists from Simon Denny to Amanda Ross-Ho, are starting off points for Malouf." The Grinch was a lesson in learning to live with the generosity of others.

Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

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Altarpieces similarity to modern info representation and GUI space makes them somehow anachronistically the most relevant from of painting, pre-renaissance painting systems matching those of the mass systems we interface with daily in which above-all information must be conveyed, supplanting figuration with codes: image as icons broken into frames and grids of information with a skeuomorphic impression of religious wonderment. It is no coincidence that devotional paintings contain the same figurative depth as a iPad screen. If today's painting is in a bad way it is because in its backtrace search for new relevance in historical modes it rutted itself at proto-modernist and surrealist modes (perhaps confusing that as its beginning) - historical points having higher covalence with advertising than with the slowly dawning hegemony of the interface which contains it. Though some have done well, Koether, Euler, Cerletty, Kelm, von Heyl in adopting a sort of hyper-link representation.
But so,  J. Ceccaldi's Giotto blue and Manga/comic forces narrative frames read, conveying information, read as individual bits, the modern day christ figure in non-binary life state taken down from no cross magically superseding death and without a Madonna to wipe him, Subway Cumrag.


See too: Ray Yoshida at David Nolan

Richard Hawkins at Jenny’s and Richard Telles

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What if we said something like, collage becomes important as the collisions of the world's disparate systems become increasing violent, and the Surrealists and Frankfurters were wrong that irrational juxtapostion wouldn't spark any mass as the world world became the biggest surrealist juxtaposition of all, and that collage in the larger sense - the sense that Hawkins has practiced since the beginning - was meant instead to make "alternative forms of touch" as soft touchdowns, as a sort of pathos? The decrepit sexual patina grown over Hawkins work wasn't always so. There were once clean young men paper-clipped to fields of bright fabric, and anyone was yet to be beheaded.

Liz Craft at Jenny’s

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Drawing from work outsider, Craft’s staunch insider position in the LA scene while catering to the capital A inside (beginning to latch onto Germanic franchises) - are satellite to it, built from grass roots effort of garage startups and frontier ranches. That like the sculptures which exude a slight too-much-presence of desert psychedelia and weirdo jest for the tastefulness of the contemporary circuit they now enter, Craft’s haphazard theatricality is generally at least her own.