"Black Rabbit, White Hole" @ Samuel Freeman

Ian Pedigo

Path of Most Resistance, 2013

Bone, shoe laces, fabric 

16 x 28.5 inches

Claude Collins-Stracensky

Michael Dopp

Melanie Schiff

Barbara Kasten

Olga Koumoundouros "Possessed by Glint and Dreams" @ Susanne Vielmetter

I imagine the artist saying something to us like "this makes me want to "throw up."" Whatever ill inside (domestic, bodily or otherwise) has to come out. The results (art?), are something like a gag from Spencer's gifts.  The ideas, throwing up a sign, a structure, bodily fluid somehow all revolve around what has to come out, a rejection presented as abjection.  I really like the roots of this exhibition. It was a place squatted by the artist, an attempt to occupy and improve its conditions through artistic intervention. Unfortunately, never having seen the place firsthand, the entire project, its political imbroglio, and its reverberation in an art gallery context "proper" all leave me with images of potentially mythical proportions. (You'd have to read elsewhere to get the whole background).  What does seem clear to me is that often the "overhead" seems oppressive and unattainable though there are occasional bright spots (colorful sprays, playfully childlike beacons of light et al) that leak through.  I guess this notion works for me in terms of domesticity (both motherhood in Olga's case and national politics more generally); frustrations of an overbuilt housing market; and the representative domiciles as better left dead (or at least in the hands of business acumen) than occupied by anything that artistic invention/intervention could possibly attain.  This project points directly to what's wrong. I just wish it had proposed a next solution rather than the perennial question of artistic futility in social terms.  What does it mean to be "sick" of something yet unable to affect the results directly? Sounds like business as usual all the way around... (and the best part is that I'm still thinking about it).

Brad Spence "Of Age" @ Shoshana Wayne

I set out really wanting to like this show, I suppose, mostly because Spence's last couple of shows have left me thinking, thinking about color, surface, and luminosity in relation to thin veils of imagery, ones at the borders of perception.  In this most recent showing, while there are a number of moves, certainly a whole repertoire of approaches, it was far too dense as an installation of paintings for my liking (and not for any valuable purpose that I could tell save the speculative notion of a lots of garments hanging on the rack (commodities for sale).

If I had to pick a favorite, though, I guess I would choose the one that looks most like Eddie Van Halen's Kramer guitar from 1984. Come to think of it, most of this show has that era's feel. "Desparately Seeking Susan" also springs to mind. So, parallel nostalgia is in play (teased hair ambiguities)… Aside from decadent, glammy connotations, each painting as raw form seems to investigate the very relation between mark and field, but just exactly how deep can this whole inquiry go? A proposed answer seems to lie just above/beyond the surface, somewhere between jizz lobs and stretched mesh (fabric, as always, the sign of painted support, at least since textiles have been industrial).

Matthew Grover, ltd presents Matthew Grover...Traps Forward @ ltd los angeles