Josephine Pryde at Galerie Neu

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Genre being the capsule that allows immediate swallowing: "They're about touch." What Isabelle Graw called "straightforwardly thematic." And so we understand them like a trojan horse, internalize with ease. Ostensibly later spring forths the latent soldiers, medicine. But it might be the gulping was the trick. Getting you to immediately get them. The cuteness of gerbils, the joke of consumption.

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini

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The instantaneous comfort of Pryde’s generalized image is the flip side to Pop’s surface, not its “style” but its mass consumability. Pop art and its current derivations so concerned with the look they forgot that style was merely the disposable package which delivered the "fun" it promised, artists tricked as though the image itself was desired, forgetting that medium was merely the massage for swallowing the masses, its opiate. People didn’t enjoy Lichtenstein they enjoyed comics, and within its soothing fantasy. Pryde uses Pop's function, the saccharine of instant recognition, variations on the common, whose comfort allow defenses dropped and desire for and easily expended, digested, disposable sweets, a populist bent to criticality, a vehicle of its own propaganda, a shutterstock imaging of normalized categories; if DISimages was the overproduction of shiny new image stock, Pryde delivers instead within the pre-existent of Trojan genres, in which the politics of aesthetics is - one hopes - redistributing the look, the sensibility, of touch.

“Lands’ End” at Bodega

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Bodega operating cooly for 5 years now and this the first CAD approved, one conspiratorially wonders if it’s with newfound Pryde.

The uncanny and abjection, and the various forms of it, from the saccharine of overripeness to detritus sticky resin stuck and mannequin wire children in floatsafe fashions, to the cold necrotic design of corporate cooperative, to place the mess against the continuing prophylacticizing of the world behind rubber corners, and all the seediness within it. A trending antagonism against clean whiteness, the final form of punk will be something with disgust no one wants at all.

David Duard at Johan Berggren , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway