The 2017 Desert X exhibition catalogue quotes Wakefield: “There was a certain kind of blankness [in Gstaad] that became the backdrop. That’s also true of the desert.” The front page of the Desert X website doubles down on this terra nullius imagery, referring twice to the desert as a “canvas” in bold caps; one onto which artists “were invited to project their vision.” This is the consistent misconstruction of the show: representing the Coachella as a void to be filled or overwritten. At best, it’s a misreading of the history and culture of the area; at worst, it’s whitewashing.

Tosha Stimage stages an analytical memorial of black mourning to address the loss of both life and meaning that accompany death turned into spectacle. The language of flowers offers an entryway into the artist’s system: Her diptych painting Vanitas (all works 2017), featuring a diving human body (reminiscent of a chalk outline) filled with collaged flowers, alongside a panel of the title, renders a Conceptualist interest in sign systems as colored by floriography and the tradition of vanitas painting. What happens when the meanings of symbols and names are forgotten or misunderstood?

The central contradiction of the show lies in the fractured landscapes and portraits: Abstract conceptions of autonomy and ruggedness run up against the deep fragility and precariousness of the environment and its human and nonhuman actors.

Using flimsy materials – crumbling styrofoam, thin plastic, cheap wiring – she emphasizes the unsubstantial nature of belonging and suggests the interwoven natural, technological, and political dimensions of what exactly it means to to “be from” somewhere. Her critique arrives at our oversimplified binary of native and nonnative.

This intricately composed show of work by international artists living between two places is deeply self-reflective about the ways that human habitation is fundamentally shifting before our eyes. The nomadic art world is a relatively privileged site from which to observe these shifts, but it operates on many of the same principles that dictate mass migration and population relocation: opportunity, flexibility, annual patterns of movement, and an ever-increasing economically driven need to be able to be in more than one place at a time.

This new exhibition of Ireland’s work, along with astute interventions by Virginia Overton, considers the disagreeable object as a traveling, translated concept.

Rather than exploring a particular locality, as with Benjamin’s historical covered shopping passageways in Paris, Kleiman resolutely pursues situations of placelessness and locations that could be anywhere: malls, casinos, airports. The spiritual seat of Premium Emporium might be a duty-free perfume boutique at a run-down international airport, or the worn paths of desire running across a casino carpet patterned to hide stains and cigarette burns. The show critically examines the mythologies of value and power that underlie such nondescript yet aspirational places where spending money is the main attraction.

...the contemporary post-photograph has developed with, and offers an analogue to, the technologies that drive our magical-thinking contemporary economy—both in parallel and literally, through its digital turn and new networked, accelerated, encoded character—as well as to the logic of the alchemy-thinking economy itself.

When photography can be altered—to present “alternative facts,” for instance—the photograph’s ability to serve as proof becomes deeply problematic. Kruithof expands and exploits this now-perennial trope by turning the evidential weakness of images into a spatial, material problem.

To imagine immersing oneself in a painting is a reverie both of synesthesia, where vision turns into touch, and of pure presence. Using language to create and navigate this fantasy renders the process one of constant translation.

The dream to speed up production isn’t new; it is explicitly as old as industrialization itself, and practically much older—we’ve been hacking the creation and distribution of material things since the concept of value was invented. What’s new is the hacking of decision-making itself, which has always been held as unwise to shortcut. At a time in late capitalism when many of our processes for value extraction seem to have exhausted the possibilities for raw potential material, increasingly abstract concepts are being presented as raw materials to be refined for the creation of value. Sprint highlights one of these new cases, in a conceptual model of alchemy of thought.

Stefanie Victor and Christopher Garrett’s show comprises a study in restraint and bodily intimacy that is disarmingly delicate in physical scale. Using a shared language of personal ornamentation in their approaches to formal in-between states, the artists take on the aesthetics and concept of the fold as something that both covers and opens out onto something else.

Many of us intuit that plants are at peace. Their seeming lack of desire combined with their seeming lack of selfhood gives the impression of blithe self-sufficiency. Almost a transcendental experience: a way of being without individuality, without subjectivity, without the intentionality that comes with human consciousness and interiority. Is that impression correct?

As an analysis of phenomenology and subjectivity, “Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space” is astute and deeply meditative. But the show also harbors a subtle but powerful ideological critique (very much in the tradition of Latin American Conceptualism) of replacing our own sense perception with technological regulation. 

This new challenge to the conceit of a painting show can be read as part of Owens’s larger, restlessly inventive, and omnivorous practice.... But this kind of playfulness serves a deadly serious purpose, which is nothing less than to short-circuit the overdetermination of painting itself.

...These are sculptures-as-children, or sculptures-as-citizens under a nanny state, only some of which will remain docile.

... At heart, the Airbnb ads highlight the affective and aesthetic characteristics of contemporary tech culture: camp, cuteness, a particular flavor of sincerity, and an underlying messianism.

The convoluted heft of the exhibition concept, in contrast with the ontological flimsiness of the actual work, generates surprising pathos around the real and the fictional Anthony Discenza, who seem to be drowning under its weight.

"I think what is being read as hospitality in the exhibition are actually topographies of our resilience as indigenous people, as descendants of survivors of the middle passage, as peoples displaced by colonial expansion and imperial warfare... how we remain dedicated to loving ourselves and our communities despite being told our entire lives by dominant culture that we aren’t worthy of it."

"The term the “historical present” to me signifies the residue of history and how we are all chained to each other through the past and present.... Historically, several of us are literally masters and slaves within the same body, so navigating the historical present can be an ongoing lifelong performance and practice of renegotiating the terms of history."