Sandra Vaka at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The world isn't so much a vampire as a system of straws attempting to drink one another's milkshake.

Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger

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What is clear is that rendering's look itself has come to represent and stand in for our imaginative space and potential. The wet image absorbed the qualities of virtual space, the sheen of the digitally plastic denoting its manipulability. You see it in the ipad lushness of Orion Martin, the nervous sweat of Atkin's avatar's forehead, the gloss of Wolfson's images dirtied, the cartoon liquidity of Juliano-Villani, the paintings of Koons. Used to stress position the subject/object delineation. The importance of iconographies for many of these people is evidence of our growing identification with icons as subjects themselves come to represent us and open to torture.


See too: Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

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The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger



The PR’s refusal to acknowledge the sexual themes leaves the perverts guessing. Erotic coupling, miscegenation of binary masculine/feminine, phallic/soft. Everything touching, lightly. Black butterflies suckling split bananas opened nectar. Spire’s gape like saddled into stirrups. This into that. Penetrating weave of wicker threaded with ticklish horsehair. Oh me oh my. Porcelain lighting on fragile goosepimpled legs, secured into stout kneepad’s digital camo. One thing into the other. “Our wedding,” the coupling, the light caressing of a face. The slit orange’s tufts.

“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas [...] Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros horn; [...] But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.” - D+G