The use of "memory" in art generally finances loathsome schmaltz, turning the weight of concrete into gold bars of MEANING. Dusty, half-remembered paintings would feel like a slight but its true, they receding, they returning to the dust they will become. A world or a child, trying to recall a horse. Trying to remember how painting was. It is stupid blurry, worthless, it is weightlessly gone. Less memory than foreboding. More futuristic than most sci-fi tech.
From last exhibition's moribund gloom to this one's concrete clowning provides a whiplash we could call slapstick. The comic whateverness. These clown jewels. But like last time eventually someone turns on the light, cleans up, eventually the parachute disappears and we're left with with walls forced to carry expensive rocks, no levity at all. No balloon, just concrete. No criticality, just painting. The sign eventually wins over its irony, there will just be jewel. We have to learn this again and again and again we never learn.
"Photographs" devoid of context become functionally useless - making them feel thin, not suited for our age of images mass trained for "engagement,""likes," advertorial smiling. (Its why gallery instagrams are desperate for those Happy Birthday! headshots - over their limitless holdings of art - abstraction is mere slop in the feed.) And these above rightfully own the wallpaper they are. That thinness, that feeling of lack is simply not selling us on something.
See too: Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space
(link)Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.
artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust.
The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday...
See too: Simon Fujiwara, The Model, Anna Zacharoff at Kantine, Ghislaine Leung at Reading International