Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel at Antenna Space

(link)

Can't help but think of the memento mori of Fischli and Weiss hand-carving trash. It was about "abusing time," the waste of labor, the clock. Here labor is venerated, monuments slow carved to it. Seating whittled with a snails pace. Again, the trend for stitching. Knitting that is engraved, like, do you get it? The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't do it to experience as a novel other. 

"...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end..."

See too: Stitching Labor, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

Group Show at Antenna Space

(link)

Thing becomes stuf. Stuf become our thing, a movement, today in art the object is animate with Kristeva flesh, a new form of object that is no longer what you see because what you see is sexually confusing. Why does a couch look like a tanned corpse, why does our/ painting look like a redundant skin. The moment is marked! Question for grad students: Why are we attracted to this? 

See too: Anti-ligature rooms, OUT NOW!

Xu Zhen at MadeIn Gallery

(link)

Xu Zhen is the guy that cut a meter off the top of Mt. Everest, showed the still-snowcapped-peak in a vitrine. Documentation to "prove" it. At the time I was interested in myth and the production of the artist - the way rumor rutted into reality, how artists became "mythic," their trademark. Now it's XU ZHEN®. What artist hasn't established a brand, released a perfume. Like the paintings - structured on the WeChat message screen - familiarity provides comfort. Comfort sells. Place your identity into a package, into an Apple store, something more easily consumable.

Liao Wen at Capsule Shanghai

(link)

[H.R.] Giger for whom the mechanical and biological found a waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny hard bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic.
And these find waypoint of flesh and bone in wood. A confusion of Ripley and her Alien queen, a newborn mess of biological scaffolding, saying "please kill me" and under flamethrower, flesh that burns like kindling. 

See too: "Unspecific Objects"

Alexandra Noel at Antenna Space, Shanghai

(link)

CAWD wrote the release for this. Go check it and the show. 

Past: Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis 

Yan Xinyue at Capsule Shanghai

(link)

Because our paintings should sweat - with heat we desire from them, from us, to condense on glass. So now there is proof of it, or at least we get to imagine it. The heat.

Rute Merk at Gallery Vacancy

(link)

Cue Radiohead, "Fake Plastic Trees," angst over our coming cling wrap lives. Emo polygon living. We spray representations of this anxiety in physical goo on material canvas. New style on old themes, as the world struggles to self-represent. Here's the process: the world, culture, attempts to manufacture a synthetic version of itself - CGI, video games, American cheese - and the artifacts, struggle, of this process is its own aesthetic, a sediment of its age. Eventually artists package this aesthetic, create 8 bit indie video games, airbrush paintings, Velveeta cheese product.


See too: Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Guan Xiao at Antenna Space

(link)

The stuf of the world congeals a character to mock us. Art of the last 5(?) years has shown itself capable of treating the inhuman as human, pressing the inanimatcy to skull and hypothesizing vitality, and so these imagined ghosts stand up like Frankenstein's monster and mock us. A yoga cushion now seeking your advice on its object orientated analysis doctor. We did this to ourselves. 40,000 years from lion-man to capitalist-waste-man.

See too: Guan Xiao at Bonner Kunstverein, David Lieske at MUMOK, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Ivy Haldeman at Capsule Shanghai

(link)

To summate, the casing is the suits, which is the comic line, which is the erotic sheen, which is the women.


see too: Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

(link)

Encased in Soylent - that complete nutritional replacement, everything the body needs, body powder, and of course us all knowing its green version is people - we couldn't help but see their pale applied flesh as bodies themselves and representations of the increasing plastics inside our own and correspondent sudden and mass fear of endocrine distribution as estrogenic seepage turning a world's men into castrati and a world's water into one giant liquid castration complex; plastics became the Freudian fear, of lost phallus now aerosolized into everything and manufacturing changed overnight in order to allow our cheap crap to come with a new sticker: BPA free. We had to protect masculinity. We had to protect the body described as "fastened to a dying animal," in a poem from time when body/mind distinctions were thought clear and imagined a possibility of being able to slough your flesh and emerge fresh to be pounded shaped into gold and set upon branches to sing like Yeats if our passages weren't so congested with stuff.

See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak,