Painter_John99 is a painter’s painter. As such, he has never touched a brush in his life. For one, paint is too expensive. And then there is the problem of space. Not space in the pictorial sense, but space as in storage. Where to put them? With rent as expensive as it is, there is no place for storing paintings. This leads also to the third problem. Time. Not time in an On Kawara sense. But time as in – who has it? Instead, he prefers to work around painting. His process is a process of miming, of showing what painting was (not is) through a poverty of materials and a lack of time. He uses his email address as his nom de plum because he is always networking and alternatively always being networked. So with this in mind, we can conclude that Painter_John99 is a painter whose work deals with time, space and materiality… and when we say this, you know exactly what we mean.

PART II

Body by Body have made a mumblecore-videogame. In the style of a Super Mario sidescroller distilled through someone who enjoys the HBO show Girls, the gamefollows one half of the duo through a personal recent diaristic-style journey reimagined as obstacle course.

Level 1: Melissa Sachs (www.twitter.com/artisdeadtatlin), one half of Body by Body, is late for her fourth job interview with Peter Halley ( (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Halley). She must make her way through a topographical Twitter, fighting various enemies including yeast infections and assholes shooting cheeseburgers and making her way to the neo-minimalist cavern that Halley inhabits. There she must dodge her accomplished opponent and escape on to the next stage.

Level 2: We find Ms. Sachs on acid (her eyes now spinning rainbow wheels) inside of Whole Foods where she must collect ten organic vegetables in order to escape (while avoiding possessed iPads and Kindles). The vector art and Kombucha distracts the viewer as our heroine disappears behind a giant New Yorker cover…

PART III

SCULPTURE FOR BURNING MAN summons a whisper blown as a breeze trapped inside a single dookie dread. Transported to the gallery inside a pewter Honda CRV with new roof rails, roof rack, bicycle rack and yoga mat, this sculpture relives “so many experiences.” Okay, simple enough, this mobile gives me the vision of a car driving really fast in the middle of a huge expanse of desert, leaving only a wicked trail of glitter playa dust behind and the sweet sound of bass drips in the air!!!!!!!

PART IV

The troll’s middle finger is an erect penis, his other hand is grabbing at his genitals. As he gestures rudely towards the mobile in the room and the other work in the show, Scarface blankly stares on in the background. Faintly, we can here him say:

What do you do ? Do you make gifs? Do you do a variation of horse ebook? a gimmick? Retweet every reply? Do all your works reference each other? DO YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS? Purposelly mispell??? Is there a preset in Photoshop you use over and over again?? Do you pretend to be a fake corporation or ‘reuse’ corporate aesthetics in a ‘transgressive’ way? Are you into Power Point presentations ? Watch CGI porn? Do you use Stock Photos? Print BIG??? Add watermarks to your work? Subvert copyright laws? Do you torrent? Troll? Why?

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Tags: Body by Body, CourtneyBlades, Deke2, Julia Rob3rts, Noble Square, West Loop