EUTOPIA

Michael Mazurek

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Michael Mazurek “Triptych” 2016. photo by Kevin Todora

Michael Mazurek
“New Paintings”
BEEFhaus, Dallas [link]

Mounting appropriated doors as painting smacks of post-modern irony: a high-modernist parody: a conceptual-minimalist “fuck you” to a system that revels in cleverness. Nonchalantly distressed by nonstandard usage the panels bear scars and lackadaisical attempts at concealment. If personified it is tragic, begging acute angles of painterly inspection, as though appreciation of casual violence against objects parallels social insight. However, if the surface is catagorically accepted it presents an improbable poetry: inaccessible and of higher authenticity than meditated actions. The piece, unwillingly, exemplifies the noumena gap, questioning our occasional correlationism at odds with our systemic un-knowing of daily life.

~ Ryder Richards
photography by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the artist

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Markus Schinwald

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Markus Schinwald
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
jointly organized with SFMOMA [link]
September 09 – December 13, 2014

Like an endoscope moving around a membrane, viewers in Markus Shwinwald’s amusing site-specific installation must proceed around walls, bars and other physical barriers to view a network of objects and images that address interconnected themes of the body. Altered 19th century paintings, adapted table legs, and other bits and pieces morph in and out of each other like muscles, bones and limbs. The objects mystify; the journey through the exhibition can feel aimless, but it rewards those who like to dwell in the imagination creating connections between things that (like disparate body parts) do not stand as strong alone.

Janeil Englestad
Images courtesy of Wattis Institute, San Francisco.
Photos by Johnna Arnold. [Read more…]