Tim Roda | The father's folly garden
Silver eye center for photography, pittsburgh (spring, 2018)
|
The tell-tale heart of your average citizen bears a cursive Tattoo with the inscription, Je suis anonyme. Each of us Meets the camera eye to eye, face to lens, and keeps clicking Until our profile is rinsed of cynicism. The projected self Moonlights as the organizing mind here, the finder of your Perfect tender disguise. We don’t kiss frogs anymore; You never see a princess with a scar. Swans follow other swans, echoes of each other, But waterbirds are bent that way. Think: differently. An uncomplicated fellowship is their specialty. There is grace in a swan’s neck-to-neck entwining, Suspension of disbelief, even, in its coiled bridges. Swans will never solve the riddle of cold fusion, But they have much to say of value about following. Read more . . . |
|
Prospect.3 | "Notes for noW"
Franklin Sirmans, Artistic Director, New orleans (FALL, 2014)
|
|
How You Figure “Post” in the PTSD? The Trauma Looks Continuous To Me
Deprived, 24/7 Injury of Sleep, Google, the Syndicate Wipe-Out List With a Subtle Fist Or Limp Wrist, I Can’t Remember, Short-Term Amnesiac on the Ambien; Exfoliated Surfaces and Particulate Debris, But the Blackmail of Bourgeois Realism Looks Like A Bouncy Castle to Me Entropy is Clever Juju in the World of Fatal Thresholds and Telematic Milieus You Think Cocking the Wigger Trigger Makes You Look Tough? To Us Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enough Read more . . . |
Wrong's what I DO best | CURATED BY HESSE MCGRAW & AARON Spangler
San francisco Art Institute, walter & mcbean gallery (FALL, 2014)
|
Jones began to chant his settling prayer to conjure up the boom boom, ward off any jitters. Don’t hedge. Bet your stack. Pray for the Suicide King. Throw it all on black. He spun this hard-bitten lullaby from the scraped out voids of his own terminal restlessness, dreaming of Exodus from recurring Babylons in the language of the double down. A blind date with Helen Keller in the future future, the intensest rendezvous with the woodpecker’s castanets. A quantum yodel – blue/not blue – (it depended on how you looked at it and for how long), to counter the insistent bongo backbeat of failure that miraculously turned, Jones knew, on a dime-bag of shitty park weed or a stepped on 8-ball of baby lax or a gallon jug of sterno marked with cartoon XXX’s, into a full-blown hostage situation. It was the “voodoo” in Voodoo Economics, the pin that Ronald Reagan stuck in the doll way back in the day, and the bodies were just now starting to fall. Read more . . . |
|
PROOF OF LIFE | AFFIDAVIT
Cultural Counsel, New York (Fall, 2016)
|
|
We were dealing in different shades of lunar darkness, now. The grisaille side of the moon. We drank from the same firehose of facts becoming facts of life in front of us, performing some variation of higher typing on boxes, in boxes; whole tides of enthusiasm, of sustaining gratitude, dissolving into white foam before our eyes, in what?—Minutes? Microns? Our landscape was green felt. Fate a wheel. And so we spun the product to the threshold of overwhelm, plumbed pressure points we, ourselves, had already put in place, applied magnets to various orbits controlling their rotation, kept the telemarketers at bay. Naturally this all occurred in New York City, for the same prescient reason Dillinger had robbed banks: because that’s where the money is. Of which, not gonna lie, we were by habit and native circumstance, excessively, ruinously fond. Read more . . . |
WERNER BUTTNER | Poor Souls
Marlborough GALLERY, New York (Fall, 2016)
|
Escobar was reliably flush with gnostic bullshit like this, but Büttner had to give it to him: Aztec Terrorista or Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa, brown-eyed girls were the best, yo. Always the best view, the best chance for you to ever bask in charm’s glow, for the bait required no wit, whatsoever – the lure, no breath of any kind, actually – spinning solely, here, on the dilation of a single pupil. In silico-millennio, or old-school in vivo, from what Büttner saw onstage, brown-eyed girls were no doubt the Conquistadoras of yore: window-givers onto double-paned worlds themselves winterized to muffle the racket of ascension within. Valkyries. Your average Teutonic-hottie with a clean credit-record and a filthy mouth, counting cards, counting jackpots, to be sure; but now in sepia-drag, a melancholy baby: so many soft palace-coups wrapped in a Trojan horse of sweet taboo – your Streetcar Named Despair. The Catwoman of chi-burglars, yeah, but look at her work that pole. The sky was all purple, there were people runnin’ everywhere . . . Read more . . . |
|
JIN MEYERSON | NO DIRECTION HOME
HAKGOEJAE GALLERY, SEOUL, KOREA (SPRING, 2016)
|
|
Time passed. The zeitgeist continued to frustrate analogic conceit, settling on a Sphinx-like nowness. Narcissus vs. Prometheus superseded Alien vs. Predator as the prevailing antagonistic mythos, though protean recombinatory genius seemed to be getting the upper hand over those still prostrating themselves adoringly at the lip of the pool. Everything sped up (including speed itself) as the island began to lose the habit of truth, boomeranging incidentally now in the general, wobbly direction of some kind of truth-substitute – a Splenda version of the truth.
Confronting Meyerson was a new species of hybrid fiction born of journalistic fact offering up grand, triumphal statements concerning the anomic state of affairs worldwide, many degrees and orders of magnitude beyond what one might consider current events, albeit slightly reductive in their totalizing impulses. Nevertheless, they resonated with his aerial, bird’s-eye, “macro” sensibility and seemed to dovetail neatly with one-half of the doubled, crippling sensation that would later become the cynosure of his work. Read more . . . |
Will ryman | TWO ROOMS
paul kasmin gallery, new york (FALL, 2015)
|
Ryman simply couldn’t wrap his head around this new language of being noticed, the way you were encouraged by just about everyone in your affinity networks to spread your contagious glow. “We live in loops," they’d insist, drawing oblongs in the air with their hands, enfolding him, making his glow their glow – adding relevant feedback as the need, or occasion arose. He understood that all experience was fast approaching the near-vicarious and that, on your own lucrative path toward self-actualization, you alone chose the level you wanted to live at, the press and flow of it, the distance and degree. But wasn’t the general idea to avoid the oversaturation of markets and people caused by the oversaturation of markets and people? A tautology, he suspected, whose circularity implicated practically everyone, while escaping exactly no one. Read more . . . |
|
margaux ogden | chekhov's Gun
LTDLOSANGELES (SUMMER, 2015)
|
|
It was a Radial World and so, naturally, it radiated. The stars in the sky were in inverse proportion to the stars on earth: shooting stars and rising stars and Stars of David dangling on thin, gossamer chains were all starlings in a summer sky – sequined grace notes flying by at a complicated, orchestral clip. They couldn’t be caught, or captured, or wished upon, let alone domesticated in any meaningful way. How quickly they became feral and insensate, these neutral eagles out on a windowsill, flushed from the shadows, waiting, offering protection and threat. Light had driven back night – it was all an anti-nocturne from here on out. So sleep was so over. Sleep was so last week. Sleep was wet rags and water, the sound a bucket made when it was kicked.
Machine-mourning and grief choked the air, an inconsolable yearning for another upgrade. They kept on talking about a sense of renewed purpose and personal agency in an accelerated and uncertain world but you had already swept up my malware, cleaned out my cache. You may have worn the false pathology of your sadness around your neck like a busted Egyptian Ankh – comical and primordial in equal measure – but you, my Candy Crush lush, you were my killer app. Read more . . . |
Richard Dupont | TERMINAL STAGE
Lever House, New York, 2008
|
My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms. - Ovid I had been warned about Richard Dupont’s studio. Various friends who held my welfare in high regard spoke in hushed, cautionary tones about a small army of replicants—possibly undomesticated, possibly feral—in shades of fetal pink. Certain occult rituals involving the digitizing of Dupont’s naked body into a kind of liquid anima were alluded to. It was said that an array of medieval looking steel calipers dangled from meat hooks suspended from the rafters, while large vats of epoxy resin nearly bubbled over onto the floor. Word on the street was that Dupont had imported some kind of gigantic soul-sucking scanner thingie that precisely captured a 3D photo of one’s entire body, but with the unfortunate side-effect of rendering said guinea pig totally amnesiac and permanently somnambulant, destined to aimlessly paw and lurch its way along the dirty boulevard. Sort of like Margot Kidder in her methamphetamine psychosis phase playing Helen Keller, if Helen Keller actually resembled a very tired, faintly translucent, seven-foot tall hood ornament. Read more . . . |
|
Nicolas Pol | Sick Atavus Of The New BlooD
Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, Ltd., NEW YORK, 2012
|
|
EXPLAINING RAINBOWS TO A RELUCTANT GARDEN GNOME Though When I Strive to be Brief I Become Obscure, as the Sun Draws the Morning Dew and Dirt its Own Delight, so goes The Bill of Fare to the Feast: Condensed, Abridged, A Gem of Concision in List Form so as not to Confound the Natural Expectations of the Reader, Containing the True and Only Account of Nicolas Pol’s Misadventures, his Record of Habitual Malfeasance, Bouts of Archetypal Pranksterism and General Vibe of Proper Villainy, up to and including a Full Retailing of the Nimble, 11th Hour Dodging of his Personal Waterloo, his Rapturous Submission to the Joys of Rigor Mortis, his Psilocybic Sleights of Hand (wherein Cracked and Parched Super 8 Motels, Presto into 5 Star, Seal-Skinned, Suppurate Hotels), and—not least—the Invocation of the Slaughter Rule and the Attendant Exhalation of the 21 Grams. Read more . . . |
Nicolas Lobo | LIMESTONED
charest-weinberg, miami, 2011
|
Nicolas Lobo, a stalker of ascendant mega-trends in their embryonic rumor stage, would likely be amused by Baker’s alarmist wake-up call. Baker’s sinister future, after all, is already Lobo’s well charted past. Raised in a Miami he describes as a 'luxury laboratory' or 'lifestyle incubator' where 'Brand Ambassadors' test out new liquors with the measured politesse of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Lobo is not only no stranger to focus groups and direct marketing, he’s pleasantly habituated to the notion that he’s merely a statistic. That his preferences are tallied into numbers. That those numbers measure the probability that other, similar 'Lobos,' or perhaps even subsequent generations of 'Lobos' might share kindred tastes. Even when he’s being systematically depersonalized, Lobo doesn’t take it personally. He doesn’t have that luxury, so to speak, since his work depends on the excess energy thrown off by Baker’s enormous, implacable data-cloud. Read more . . . |
|
Helen Verhoeven | The Accelerated Grimace
Wallspace, NY / mesler & Hug, los angeles, 2008
|
|
The chimerical figures in Verhoeven’s paintings, then, are phantasmic mannequins in arrested motion whose facial features you might describe as “expressionless,” except that, as repositories for a sedimentary imagination keyed to an astral clock, perhaps that word’s too strenuous. Bleached and leached, they denote the last concentric circle in a ripple effect from a stone tossed way long ago. Her frequency is shorn of gross amplitudes and virtuosic rendering simply because she’s interested in totalities, not the overly precious, annoyingly finicky, ham-handed particulars of a facial expression that would convey any sentiment beyond self-protective withdrawal from a condition of absorption braided – then interpenetrating – theatricality. They who tell do not know; they who know do not tell, said Lao Tzu. Silence vs. Loquacity. Where is the fermata? That’s the deep Yoda shit that Verhoeven is on. Read more . . . |
NICOLE CHERUBINI | LIBERACE OR LIL’ WAYNE?
GASSER & GRUNERT, NEW YORK, 2006
|
Gold and silver chains of various thicknesses vomit out of lions’ mouths, in a burlesque of a true gargoyle’s original function. The word “gargoyle,” it’s worth noting, is etymologically derived from “gargle,” and once upon a time, before gargoyles became decorative talismans guarding entryways, or forbidding doorknockers making solicitors think twice, their actual function was to expel water from stone pipes. Not anymore. Cherubini’s gargoyles discharge the blinged out accoutrements of a self- appointed ghetto-fabulous culture itself in a decadent phase of decline. Liberace or Lil’ Wayne? “G’d up from the feet up,” but why should we care, Cherubini seems to ask. Locked and loaded with ridiculous amounts of what in the end amounts to chain link, the ghetto fabulous aesthetic becomes, in the final accounting, about as ruinous and decayed as a cement drainage ditch. The Monuments of Passaic become, in the hands of Cherubini, the Monuments of the Marcy Projects. Read more . . . |
|
ERIK PARKER | SIX MINUTES …
LEO KOENIG, INC., NEW YORK, 2000
|
|
Six minutes (pause), six minutes (pause), six minutes Erik Parker you're on. On, on, on ... (and on and on) in a syncopation of the beats (that's the groove) with the rhymes (that's the lyrics). Not like you need to be told (I get it! [cue forehead slap] You mean like hip-hop, ghetto-tech, De La and Wu?); Parker's just warming up the crowd before he can hit it and split it and basically wield his paintbrush like the microphone fiend you wish you were. But since you don't have the keys to the canon (art history, comics, graffiti, the whole afrofuturistic astral plane), you can't unlock the vault. No worries; this is the canvas tomb that Parker built (with a little help from his friends Mr. Guston and Mr. Dunham); a floating Archigram blueprint of distended bladders, and trippy Seussical arabesques memorializing the founding fathers, while fathering a new foundation. You might say Parker's hacking into his own repressed patricidal impulses, but without the Oedipal histrionics. The proof is in the liner notes or acknowledgment page or whatever label you want to attach to Parker's funky rolodex splayed out over the surface of his paintings like an aerial view of the Mudd Club's VIP room. Read more . . . |
