Here’s the latest Spring menswear line worn by the hottest male models of the twenty-eighth century, those jaunty scions of cyborg overlords. Our wetwear bodies found a hardware durability after we and our machines, long flirting, finally coupled. Moodily lit with mint and hot pink, humanoid bods sport flight jackets and tennis togs and fencing uniforms with patterns like alien cryptography, their sculptural faces as interchangeable as their clothing. Once the singularity curves past us, why wouldn’t we change our faces at will? Who needs a mouth when we can communicate telepathically, plug in for nourishment? These head-sculptures angle with Bauhausian geometries and deco motifs, the curves of Incan spaceships and patterns of ancient Greek friezes. All of it soft and foamy. Even cyborgs yearn for a little pliability. The models gently revolve on screen, giving us the whole fit, a catwalk turn, even as those bods stay otherwise still in their languorous revolutions. Nearby, the heads of these on-screen models sit on plinths in all their bend and ornament, ready for a discerning consumer to find the expression that fits their fast-paced cosmic lifestyle, a new head for a new season. Brian Bress has long been casting characters and creatures …

“The Lifestyle Press,” a group exhibition curated by Gil Blank, opened with its ambitions foreclosed. Just days before, Blank had been informed that the publication which was to accompany the show, a mock junk-mail circular with coupons that could be used toward the purchase of artworks, would not be printed under threat of legal action. Apparently, when the UPC numbers on the coupons—expired in some cases, fudged in others—failed to check out, the printer and distributor refused to go forward with publication. As a framed letter hanging in the front gallery explained, producing the circular would have made all parties involved liable to suit. At the urging of Cherry and Martin’s lawyer, Blank abandoned his pursuit of circulating the circular, and instead resolved to present the cancelled proofs in the gallery. A cynic might call this a confirmation of the inevitable: is it any surprise that the circulars, which were to have been inserted into the Los Angeles Times and sold at a low cost, ended up back in the embrace of gallery walls? And wasn’t their gamble—that someone could coupon-clip his/her way into collecting art—a little too improbable to be of much critical consequence? But cynicism distracts from what might …

Text—as a never-finished, always-mutable, and labored process of thought—is the internal organizing logic of Amanda Ross-Ho’s recent production. The artist prepared the press release for her show, “A Stack of Black Pants,” as a sequential composite of paragraphs from the press releases accompanying her previous three exhibitions at Cherry and Martin. Rhyming quantity with chronology, it is made up of one paragraph from the artist’s first solo show (2006), two from her second (2007), and three from the third (2008). The resulting amalgam has been ruthlessly edited with still-visible redactions strategically striking through most of the recycled texts, leaving cherry-picked words and letters intact to create a new collective meaning. Occasionally, the continuous crossing-out is broken into staccato dashes by areas of bold red type in a slightly enlarged font that generates a tiered text floating above the field of slashed, rehashed sentences. Writ in red (the instructor’s disciplinary ink), the new revised statement sets up the editing process and its cumulative measures of (re)assessment and modification as the foundational creative frame for this show. This is most explicit in a new series of “Correction” paintings—big (96 x 72 inches) white canvases bearing the red and black marks (checks, Xs, circles, …