Marte Eknæs at Efremidis & Sam Lewitt at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture

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(Efremidis, Z33)

Spooky object scary time. Ominous, cold. An emptiness we the viewer backfill with projections for what could be. See apparitions. See ghosts in the machine. Invent spirits in the trees, gods in the heavens that care about us. Artists as shamans show us the way, the truth, the light, the emptiness. 

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

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Lewitt seems to invent covers for books, images that contain a promise, alluding to some deeper richer story. Instead we get a press release. The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too. Not a book by its cover and all that.


see too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Sam Lewitt, Lucy Raven at Pilar Corrias

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Clean the place out. Strip the lights. Burn the light to turn up the heat. Set the lights to "Siren." Representations of our current boring dystopia, both artists reaffirming the callous concrete conditions of the world, its artificialness and austerity, a coldness we begin to find somehow pleasing, enjoying our pleasure denied by assertions of power, warmth in the current that designates our capitalist life, comfort in our mastery by others as we acclimate and absorb the cold conditions of our world, artists thinking in the master's voice.


See too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel, Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu, John Knight at Greene Naftali

Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Keeping the lights on" is synonymous with capitalist vitality, the blood flow current signifying property over time, which Lewitt turns to heat, redirecting its energy to liminally exchange light for warmth for the corpse.

It's impossible to be certain whether the new techno-conceptual isn't anything more than a refurbished arte-povera, in which its spirituality and metaphysics is replaced with a ghost in the scary looking machines of a predestined future come to haunt us menacingly, like cultures assigning gods and poetry to corral phenomena we are at a loss to control.


See too:  Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

(Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu)

Technocratic sculpture, symbols of technology and information as banners draped over the bones of the Unmonumental styles, an art that appears new, shiny, and once again copper, made to be placed on the covers of philosophical texts as illustrations of the spooky newness of our condition, emblems. Bochner measuring with the giddy glee of new technologies.  These aren’t conceptual objects but representational ones. They depict the information they contain.The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too.

See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon , Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps