Past: Brook Hsu

"... like looking at a museum through Heineken bottles ... And this chromatic loss only instead heightens desire, want for the full spectral ecstasy, denied in your beer-glassed body. Maybe this is what Homer meant by a wine dark sea, ... But, this continually applied loss could be metaphorically over attended, it is too meaningful, and wants for. Its erotic denial is itself a thing..."

Full: Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Brook Hsu at Manual Arts

Elizabeth Orr at Derosia

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Painting takes on the appearance of a widget, a machine for itself. Functionality is an appearance, an affect of form. Like Matt Paweski, there's an enjoyment of the functional object's subservience, a footrest for your feet, for your eyes it displays.  

see: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto

Magali Reus at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle

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Reus is exemplar of the cartoonification of the world. Everything convertible to plastic, printable. "tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly." Now the chore becomes pressing print, of everything on everything, Paintings are already printed on totes to toilet paper so why not a wooden spool? The algorithm combines and consumer clicks value. The artist becomes the algorithm in a society that doesn't know what it wants. The great recombinator. Post Rachel Harrison blowing up the mall - it returns as souvenirs. It is not the artist's "semantic ambivalence" - it is the world's. The world is stupid and functioning, and art we are given we are said to deserve. 

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga, Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Past: Magali Reus at Westfälischer Kunstverein

"the created objects treat the real as constructible, the physical as putty in cartoons, detached from their specific instance and arranged into hieroglyphs, what Javier Hontoria referred to as the artists's 'semantic ambivalence.'"


Magali Reus at Westfälischer Kunstverein

Patricia L. Boyd at Secession, Vienna

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The "certifying white light." Of food porn, pornography, and god. Also the gallery. Product photography. To reduce blemishes. Feign omniscience. Pretend to be science, all knowing, objective. If we could remove darkness, spend extra on the intricacy, we would find some kind of truth-identifying substance. We only require extra wattages, a more technical brilliance, higher levels of magnification, detail, analysis. Then it will be revealed. The exhaustion engine. 

Past:  Patricia L. Boyd at Christian Andersen & Front Desk Apparatus

"But what does this system produce? Nothing except an image of itself. The artist refers to the work as an “exhaustion engine.” It simultaneously represents and realizes the use and expenditure of her artistic resources: a commission fee and a studio at the NASA-grade production facilities" -Annie Godfrey Larmon Artforum

Someone once said that Sports were simply an advanced random number generator for creating stories. Sometimes art seems a similarly tangential means for the same.

Past:  Patricia L. Boyd at Christian Andersen & Front Desk Apparatus

 Past: Hana Miletić 

"...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. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because 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.

"Because knitting is so laboriously outmoded it can only be care, i.e. not capitalism, more love hours than can ever be repaid, etc. Knitting is the province of excess time, and attention, which translates to -anticapitalist- care)"

Full: Notes on Stitches, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma