Jessie Homer at Various Small Fires

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The self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who honeymooned at Elizabeth Taylor's estate and lived at "an idyllic 2½-acre estate in Beverly Hills." Grandma Moses or Clementine Hunter style depiction of rural cemeteries inflects differently painted from the window of wealthy LA county. "Self-taught" but in a Beverly Hills estate sense. None of this would matter if folk traditions weren't generally class traditions. 

Sean Raspet at Various Small Fires

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The cultural image of genetic mutation, a shared fear: three eyed fish, double headed calves, glowing cats, turtle ninjas, C.H.U.D.s. Or its potential, Golden Rice, AquAdvantage® Salmon, a cataclysm resistant earth.  Accurate or not, the point is a shared etherous cultural fear/potential, a readymade collective unconscious understanding, and these are artworks reaching in to press the button on this anxiety. They gesticulate a potential, a possibility that is aestheticized, juiced on techno-minimalism, to create a Rorschach test reflecting all the cultural baggage they can muster. They need not, nor shouldn't, produce any function of their possibility, because in good conceptual art fashion they neuter any aesthetic to be replaced with its potential. They are inkblots.

There are already artworks with GMOs, people paint with proteins modified for fluorescence, but they don't do thing we demand of contemporary art, clip the image and provide a space for projection.  (See too: Trevor Paglen) The potential monster in the closet is scarier than the monster that appears; an unfortunate fact for our cinematic universe is that most IRL apocalypse/advancement turns out looking pretty banal, but the fear/potential is pretty spectacular.

Josh Kline at Various Small Fires

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The PR states this "explores the catastrophic implications of America’s political dysfunction." No, it doesn't. For the students in the room this is called "puffery" "a promotional statement or claim which no 'reasonable person' would take literally." A generous read is that it is simply an anti-display, inverse to the usual ebullient displays of US nationalism, the equivalent of how in high school I wore a t-shirt with an inverted flag and thought that was cool. This is Piss Christ but with a flag in a TV and stained. A perhaps formally interesting technique (like, how did all those clowns fit in that car) this should have been one of those quiet shows you use to make a buck in a new city but now boom it is on CAD and mildly soiled underpants for everyone to see.


see too: Josh Kline at Modern Art

Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires

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I think the reason you can google "underwater realistic painting" and see it's a popular theme is that a photograph of people shattered in water intrinsically appends the abstraction we want and associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, it does the work for it. It's already painting even without it, the mechanistic process of representation doesn't ruin it.

Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

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A stitch correlates to time, it is a labor visible in increments. While brushstrokes may have been the impressionist equivalent, modernism seemed, somewhat, goal orientated toward removing the more intensive marks of labor (first for a performative "expressive," the work was not labor but expression) before culminating in Minimalism and Conceptual art, two legacies infatuated with things ostensibly springing from ether. (The instructions being the art, not the 40 museum interns drawing it.) I'm not sure what this meant for them, their desiring to be capitalists, desiring to wipe the sweat from their aluminum, but it's still a desire today, no wants want to imagine previous fingerprints on their new iPhone. So the workers hands are latexed. Work, labor, sweat is the parcel of something we denigrate to the great purity of "good design," that cerebral craft we revere, which should be clean, elegant, and without a trace of sweat.


see too: “Tierra. Sangre. Oro.” at Ballroom Marfa, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Brendan Fowler at Mathew

Julie Curtiss at Various Small Fires

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Domenico Gnoli in Christina Ramberg styles, we see the banal given a character and edge, a rippling read like tea leaves.

“Hecate” at Various Small Fires

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Of course art's a witchcraft, disproved by the sciences, elucidated by sociology and psychology, in which a practice's material insistence affects a viewer magically: think tarot, images drawn and illuminated shine to bounce around in your head to alight some new substance inside, like any painting. The further you believe in the drawing the more deeply it affects. A potion for wealth eventually brings it through stubborn physical existence on your kitchen counter to remind you that's what you value, seek. Any object's aboutness, its meaning, it tautologically enacts like a string tied around your finger: the string doesn't necessarily intrinsically symbolize "pick up eggs;" its meaning is conjured by the reminded who tied it. Objects are imbued with meaning, even snakes humans are not primed to fear but primed to develop some emotional response to, blank slates all. Like art the trick is getting anyone to believe it enough to keep it in their home, tie it to their being.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at Various Small Fires

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Upward estimates 90% of the artworld’s potato-heads can’t grow their cranial’s cognomen. Having watched them grown on Mars last summer perhaps preventing widespread artist famine in the eventuality of. But so obviously not the best viability judges, us, and, though we never intended to be rationality's assessors, in these logistics before us we become ecological arbiters, hoping to find our judgements of art equitable with judgements of viability. They're not. Luckily the brine shrimp and worm farms come in aesthetic packages, colored and shaped in higher orders than the mere quadrilateral. It doesn't matter if Eliasson's garden is productive, HUO is still going to hire him for his because it won't merely look viable it will look like the future, like there is a future.

Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

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Yao's recurring placement of things inside or stuck to bodies, like words to bone-like sticks or injected in ladders, having gotten progressively more bodily, seems concerned with the carrier, things embedded with the foreign, infiltrated. Surrealist juxtaposition in an age bio-medical cybernetics, aerosolized industrial waste and food packaging with endocrine disruptors distributed between ever more complex global conglomerates makes war and diamonds seem quaint as the juxtaposition is dispersed into further and further micro-artificialities, plastics outweighing plankton in certain parts of the ocean. The sculpture here is called Doppelgängers, consisting of Rice, PVC rice, polyester resin, epoxy resin, freshwater pearls, plastic pearls.


“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel