Sarah Charlesworth at Campoli Presti

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Not being able to see the object inferred, the faintness and its soft faded form, leaving it where sight doesn't quite apprehend it, indefinite states where even though we barely see the thing we still think we know it. Charlesworth's excision of variables from photography leaves portions of its experience as it. Here we don't really see anything, but still see. Dropping the context from objects so we are left with ourselves reflected in them, nobody to hold your hand through it.  The coldness of such a practice might seem to border cruel.

See too: Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

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Stripped of their container, context, the images mutate amoeba-like. They abstract, branching to grasp reference, a fluid in search of conceptual container, they become Rorschach blots, meaningless shapes drawing meaning from the viewer who wishes to name them, and from the society who would place them there, these images of people leaping to their death.

“Popular Images” at Karma

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"Popular images" is a perfect name. While appropriation dealt with images specific, today's hand-me-down version diffuses appropriation as a genericism, the culturally dispersed vagueness, accumulated echos in the gunked corners of visibility that we usually wash off our eyes, the hyper-distilled image of all the generic shit we see.
This inhabitation of the generic is meant as a critical doubling, to embody the other in clean assimilation of a replicant criticality, inverted where the ostensibly artistic human desires the borg-like reproductive body of capital info-machines. This doubling is expected as opposition to its takeover, but it may betray a latent desire to welcome the new overlords, to see the body destructed, and offer aid to the enemy. Like us and our reproductive master.

2 more versions of this show to come.