Steve Alexander

Roundway Hill, Wiltshire, July 23rd, 2011 via Steve Alexander

Steve Alexander is one of the world’s foremost crop circle documentarians. This month he joins Skink Ink Fine Art in Williamsburg for Rural Graffiti, an exhibition of his photographic prints. Alexander shows his striking aerial photographs of crop circles from the past three summers in the UK, where a majority of these formations have occurred since the 1970s. He reveals the massive scale and flawless geometric shapes that are undetectable from the ground, providing professional records of a temporary artform to media, researchers, and the public. The gallery exhibits thirty of them, many of which are blown up past poster size.

See Rural Graffiti at Skink Ink Fine Art in Williamsburg through November 27^th.

Nicole Handel

"Symphony no. 9" via Nicole Handel

Nine year Bed-Stuy resident Nicole Handel draws form her community and whimsical imagination to create dreamy mindscapes with gouache, watercolor, and sharpie in her latest exhibition at Yes Gallery, Concrete Garden. Handel contrasts fantasy with reality, and nature with city when rainbow trout and blooming lilies float among high-rise housing projects and cars. Her fertile, volatile scenes are so saturated with color and form both abstract and figurative that it takes patience to fully absorb each painting. Pastel splatters of watercolor cover the majority of the canvas, where she also captures the delicate architectural details of city blocks. It’s difficult to discern her process when indications of technical and spontaneous techniques seem to devolve into each other. To construct such a precise vision from a precarious medium is Handel’s mysterious dance between improvisation and careful planning.

Concrete Garden is now on view at Yes Gallery in Greenpoint until November 13th.

Brian Dewan

Brian Dewan "Undertow" 2011, drawing from The Tide Waits For No Man Filmstrip, via Pierogi

In his latest exhibit at Pierogi, visual, performance, and musical artist Brian Dewan pokes at humankind’s haughtiness in our tendency to ignore potential unintended consequences of tampering with the natural world. His spoof takes the form of a filmstrip—those dry, hokey educational slideshows from the 1950s. Dewan wrote and performed his own dark and humorous narration of the effect of the moon on humans and tides. Dewan’s watercolors that line the walls of the gallery are the film’s slides, which illustrate both the tidal effects of the moon, and cartoon-faced characters skeptical at the well-founded science behind the facts. They grumble at the thought of moving their beach gear when the tides rise, and genuinely wonder why we can’t use our technology to nuke the moon in lieu of such inconvenience. Dewan skillfully avoids condescension by offsetting the severity of his message with playfully tongue-in-cheek visuals and genuinely funny lines.

See The Tide Waits for No Man in Gallery 1 at Pierogi in Williamsburg through November 13^th.

Amanda Dow Thompson

Amanda Dow Thompson, Ghost Moth installation view via Causey Contemporary

Amanda Dow Thompson’s latest show at Causey Contemporary is an examination of transience and permanence when light shines through her sculptures and creates shadows as dynamic as a prism’s rainbow. The sculptures of carved wood, cast resin and cast glass hang from the center of the gallery ceiling. The dreamy resin and glass ones look like double helixes, while the wooden ones feel like some bone hybrid of rib cage and spine, columnal and swirling, support systems that are somehow delicate themselves. Light projects through them as they slowly spin, casting blurred organic shapes. On the wall are Andrew Garn’s photographs of these shadows, cast with colored light creating a more kaleidoscopic version of the live view behind it.

Ghost Moth is now on view at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through November 6^th

Re/Deconstructing History

Jessica Stoller "Untitled" via Like the Spice

The latest group show at Like the Spice features five artists who challenge perceptions of our shared past by reappropriating imagery and techniques throughout (art) history. One standout is Jessica Stoller who works with traditionally decorative and innocuous porcelain lace figurines to reimagine and subvert femininity through violent imagery. Joseph Heidecker livens vintage photographs by embroidering them with colorful beads and string, especially effective where they look like muscle fibers on a weight lifter. All artists manage to successfully modernize variably antiquated materials and representations in ways we haven’t seen and wouldn’t expect, which are inspiring especially to fellow artists.

Re/Deconstructing History is now on view through November 6^th at Like the Spice in Williamsburg.

David Scher

David Scher "Bagnolo Series" 2011 via Pierogi

“Tired of being spoken to? Look at these drawings. Letters hover waiting assignment. Books are where letters clam up,” artist David Scher lyrically advertises his latest exhibition at Pierogi. Over the past year while living in Marseille, France, Scher created eleven mixed media drawings that look like they’ve been recently retrieved from a time capsule. He threads string though wrinkled, aged paper where letters and numbers dance around quickly jotted Latin phrases and puddles of watercolor that appear seamlessly intentional and like spilled coffee. All elements saturate the frame but remain staccato symbols floating about like stars waiting for a viewer to see a constellation. Or perhaps like the day’s detritus settling down to form some patchwork narrative in a whimsical dream.

See David Scher Between the Acts: the Bagnolo Suite in Gallery 2 at Pierogi in Williamsburg until November 13^th.

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich, "Elevator Pitch" 2011 via Sean Kelly

Argentine-born Leandro Erlich’s latest exhibition Two Different Tomorrows is named for the confusion that arose while the artist was traveling in Asia, making his “tomorrow” a different day from the gallery’s. His sculptural installation at Sean Kelly uses elevators as its central symbol for space and time warping. In Erlich’s words an elevator is “a functional object, but one in which life seems to be suspended parenthetically.”

In the center of one of the gallery rooms stands an elevator stuck between floors, an ode to a state of limbo. Peer down and see a newspaper crossword tossed on the floor, as if forgotten by captives upon rescue. Another room contains open elevator banks that become a mind-bending maze. The only working elevator in the exhibition opens and closes its doors to show a video of actual elevator passengers filmed in Tokyo.

An elevator shaft is turned on its horizontal axis and viewers are invited to walk inside through the dark concrete cave toward an elevator car. The light at the end of the tunnel comes from the main gallery, where viewers emerge once again questioning their sense of space and direction.

Two Different Tomorrows is now on view at Sean Kelly Gallery through October 22^nd

Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh "Fallen Star 1/5" 2008-11, via Lehmann Maupin

Seoul born Do Ho Suh expresses cultural displacement and a mental dual citizenship through a preoccupation with architecture and memory of space, especially in the home. The exquisite detail of his replicas and miniatures is irresistible in his latest exhibit Home Within Home at Lehmann Maupin.

Suh first came to America in 1991 to attend RISD. He wrote a story that describes his journey as the result of a tornado lifting and carrying his home in Korea across the Pacific Ocean and crashing it into the side of his new home in Rhode Island. The highlight of the show is a scaled model of Suh’s personal fable. The brick home in Providence is split, displayed in cross section and includes every last coffee table book and window treatment.

Suh has also created exoskeletons of objects in his current New York home—a bathroom sink, circuit breaker, door knobs—made of what appears to be a nylon polyester blend. Monochromatic and framed in tight bundles, these 3D objects appear like insect specimens on the gallery walls.

Home Within Home is now on view at Lehmann Maupin in Chelsea until October 22^nd.

Richard Serra

Richard Serra "Cycle," 2011 via Gagosian Gallery

Groundbreaking minimalist artist Richard Serra’s latest sculptures are perhaps the highlight of Chelsea’s fall art season. “Junction” and “Cycle” are walls of thirteen-foot high weatherproof steel, sandblasted to a range of rusty oranges and browns. Enter and wander through tight tunnels that lean in then suddenly peel away and spill out into broad spirals. This cinematic experience feels like discovering and getting lost in a desert cave, both delightful and somewhat intimidating. Serra provides plenty of replay value as there are several ways to make your way through this maze of metal ribbons. Inevitable and sudden encounters with fellow viewers force a rare, shared experience.

Junction/Cycle is now on view at Gagosian Gallery (24^th St.) in Chelsea until November 26^th.

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz, "After the Bath, after Edgar Degas," 2011 via Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

In his latest series Pictures of Magazines 2, Brooklyn-based Vik Muniz continues his practice of photographing his own found object mosaic works. Muniz is the subject of last year’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Waste Land. The film chronicles the artist’s return to his native Brazil where he finds inspiration for his next project on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Muniz befriends catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, and hires them as artist assistants to arrange garbage into giant portraits of fellow catadores.

At Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Muniz instead recreates iconic imagery out of torn magazine pages and the result is surprisingly painterly. Each tear replaces the gesture of a brushstroke as the topography mimics globs of paint. Thousands of decontextualized media scraps become a visual miscellany suggesting a constant stream of updates. When arranged into the likeness of a single work, once labored over by a single artist, Muniz seems to point out a discrepancy of focus and value over time.

Pictures of Magazines 2 is now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in Chelsea until October 15^th.

Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage "Afternoon Feeding" 2011, via David Zwirner

In a contemporary art environment that shies away from figurative representation, Philadelphia-born Lisa Yuskavage boldly paints female nudes and has created her own cast of signature plush, erotic, brooding, youthful characters. In her latest exhibition at David Zwirner, Yuskavage has enlarged her usual scale to dimensions a viewer must walk across to see in full, a development that likely goes hand in hand with her more prevalent use of vast landscape.

A toxic yellow-green smoggy glow envelopes her fertile figures, who coyly display and contemplate themselves as cartoonish but dangerous Lolitas. But these are not simply portraits. Yuskavage’s works contain entire cinematic scenes filled with art historical references. Her process as of late usually begins with free association that reveals itself to be symbolic. Yuskavage then grabs hold of this glimmer and enhances it into a flash.

The highlight of the exhibition is Yuskavage’s first triptych, which began as a single panel and evolved organically into a more than 25-foot-long piece. A very personal interview with the artist in this season’s issue of BOMB Magazine details her artistic journey so far, including pivotal advice that emboldened her to bring her own provocative personality to her paintings. Read the transcript here.

Lisa Yuskavage is now on view at David Zwirner in Chelsea until November 5^th.

Yutaka Sone

Yutaka Sone "Little Manhattan" (detail), 2007-09, via David Zwirner

Originally trained as an architect, Japanese artist Yutaka Sone has focused his inclination for obsessive detail on sculpture at his latest exhibition Island at David Zwirner.

The entire first room of the exhibit is devoted to a single white marble sculpture. With the help of photographic reproductions, helicopters, and Google Earth, Sone created “Little Manhattan.” Weighing in at two and a half tons, the scaled model includes every street, avenue, building, and bridge east to west. The jagged edges drop off and seem to melt like a curtain of wax.

In the next room, more marble sculptures mingle with banana trees made from steel framework and rattan, a natural plant fiber. He paints them a bright but true-to-life green that pops in a white room filled with white objects. In a series of more marble sculptures called “Light in between Trees,” Sone brings physicality to rays of light. He carves the rays in rounded cartoon proportions that add a pop art element to an otherwise classically informed work of realism.

In Island, Sone exposes the cultural ambiguity of such a landform by playing with the natural and architectural connotations of the word through contrasting forms of jungles and cities. Be sure to see more of his stunning pieces in this survey of selected works.

Yutaka Sone Island is on view at David Zwirner until October 29^th.

Jordan Eagles

Jordan Eagles "Bar 1 - 9" 2009 via Causey Contemporary

At Hemoglyphs, the current show at Causey Contemporary, New York City native Jordan Eagles encases salvaged slaughterhouse blood in plexiglass and UV resin. The resulting ceiling-high abstract sculptural murals are incredibly bold, both in form and intention. His method permanently preserves the blood’s color and texture. Light shines through the panels to reveal unexpected details in the layers of blood, which vary to appear every red between black and baby pink. Some coats are splashed and dripped while others are crystallized and congealed into a glowing tapestry of pauses at different stages of the preservation process.

Eagles mysteriously avoids profanity by presenting objects so unapologetically big, bright and bold as to numb any squeamish reaction. By going all in, he humbles the viewer into absorbing the visual effect rather than the gory medium. It’s ambiguous whether the source material is meant to make a political statement. But the suspension of a vital, flowing substance as abstract imagery seems rife with universally applicable interpretations.

Hemoglyphs is now on view at Causey Contemporary in Williamsburg through October 2^nd.

Samuel Rousseau

Samuel Rousseau "Untitled (The Tree and Its Shadow)" 2008-11, via Parker's Box

Having recently completed his residency at PointB studio in Williamsburg, French artist Samuel Rousseau presents a reaction to his environment in his latest solo exhibit at Parker’s Box.

In Brave Old New World Rousseau continues his tradition of adding movement to sculpture using video projections. Swaying leaves and twigs are projected through a bare tree, casting an animated shadow. He projects billowing smoke and fire onto symmetrical cutouts of apartment buildings and skyscrapers to create apocalyptic Rorschach inkblots. Gel capsules sealed in blister packs each contain a bird's eye view of a man walking its perimeter, an illusion Rousseau achieves by placing video behind the translucent pills.

In Williamsburg, a penchant for the old world has evolved into the borough’s brand. Rousseau takes this notion and expands it to address New York’s shifting position on the totem pole of global cities. New York appears increasingly rusty when compared to emerging metropolises like Abu Dhabi and Chonqing. Here, Rousseau draws an optimistic paranoia from New York’s illustrious, immortal spirit.

Brave Old New World is now on view at Parker’s Box in Williamsburg until October 30^th.

John Stoney

John Stoney "Andromeda Galaxy" 2011 via The Boiler

The high ceilings and exposed brick of a former factory boiler room somehow provide a fitting space for John Stoney’s latest work. His muted, prehistoric palette would drown in the harsh sterile light of most contemporary art galleries. At The Boiler’s current exhibition Stay close to me, it will be dark soon, Stoney ambitiously and poignantly bridges the incomprehensible gap between the individual and vast geological time.

In “The Speed of the Earth Series” Stoney creates videos of the cosmos from locations central to his life—Texas, Brooklyn, upstate New York—highlighting that each degree of latitude on the Earth’s surface travels at a different speed. “Midway Clock” is a video of Jupiter’s real-time movement across the Texan sky on the artist’s 45^th birthday.

As Stoney etches galaxies, planets, and stars into chipboard, the raised byproducts create the illusion of stardust. In his own words: “The show is about, at midlife, looking to the sky for perspective. It’s about the night and all its grandiloquences on mortality and significance, and how all it purports can’t compete with the tenor of daily life, of birds waking up, and of thoughtful decisions on the comparative qualities of kitty litter.”

Stay close to me, it will be dark soon is now on view at The Boiler in Williamsburg until October 9^th.

Rotganzen

"Quelle Fête" is the latest installation by Dutch artist collective Rotganzen. Unfortunately this melting disco ball can only be seen at the Wenneker Pand in Schiedam, the Netherlands. But see more of their inviting expressions of "fear and desire, cynicism and euphoria, irony and frustration, boredom and happiness" in their online gallery here.

Mindy Shapero

Mindy Shapero, "What it looks like on the outside when you are trying not to see the insides leaving again and again", 2011 via Marianne Boesky Gallery

The title of Mindy Shapero’s exhibit Breaking Open The Head is both a reference to Daniel Pinchbeck’s book on psychedelic shamanism, and a literal description of some of her work. The show centers around three shell-like sculptures of giant hollow heads. At first glance the forms appear amorphous. The first major sculpture is a black head tipped on its side to reveal pieces of matching black paper precisely arranged into swirls. The matte sheen and seductive fur-like effect of this painstaking embellishment completely distract from the subsequently obvious head form.

On an upward facing head, she paints paper cutouts black, leaving white at the edges. The surface appears white, but as the viewer walks past the head, a black void between the sheets adds an ambiguous visual and symbolic depth to the piece.

On the third head, she paints the face with solid gold leaf while the inside reveals multi-colored concentric circles, organic and irregular like growth rings of a tree. Other sculptures continue the head motif. A series of facial profiles are drawn out of bent metal rods and arranged around a multicolor paper form that slowly reveals itself to be a continuation of the silhouette, giving the illusion of a spinning movement. In another piece, the roles are reversed. The backs of heads are drawn out of the rods while the facial silhouette is completed by a single paper form in the center, like a Rubin vase.

Shapero uses extreme absence and presence of space and color to thoughtfully defy expectations. She baits us with her stunning craftsmanship to distract from her basic forms. When the two are realized at once, her rich perspective on mental tangibility and intangibility emerges throughout her body of work.

See Breaking Open The Head at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea until October 22nd.

Nick Cave

Nick Cave "Speak Louder" 2011 via Jack Shainman Gallery

Nick Cave combines his training in textiles and dance to create body sculptures called Soundsuits. Chelsea’s Jack Shainman and Mary Boone galleries have teamed up to exhibit his latest work. At Jack Shainman, Ever After exhibits three sets of sculptures and a video installation. In “Mating Season” nine shaggy white rabbit-eared figures are arranged in a row at slightly different positions to suggest multiple frames of a single entity’s sexual gesture. “Speak Louder” displays seven figures with protruding circular heads unified by a single draped cloak embroidered to shimmering saturation with black buttons and bugle beads. The bodies resemble a band of forlorn animated trumpets.

Oddly enough, these figures are subdued in comparison to the psychedelic chaos down the street at Mary Boone. Cave’s imagination runs wild as he assembles found and organic objects into unseen combinations. For Now takes place in a high-ceiling room where a platform acts as a dance floor extravaganza of interacting figures. Globes, antique metal toys, and porcelain roses become cohesive textures through Cave’s limitless ingenuity and craftsmanship. The two shows are tied together when twigs take the place of buttons in monochrome figures with familiar disc-like heads, a cross between Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things and a subwoofer.

Cave’s exhibit titles may suggest a future mellowing of his work. The loud, pandemonic miscellany on display at Mary Boone is an ephemeral manifestation of his vision. His more emblematic series at Jack Shainman seems to indicate a shift away from spectacle to contemplation.

See For Now at Mary Boone Gallery until October 22^nd and Ever After at Jack Shainman Gallery until October 8^th

Michael Schall

Michael Schall "Eidophusikon" 2011, via Pierogi

It’s September and Brooklyn’s summer gallery hiatus has passed. This month, Michael Schall exhibits his new graphite drawings at Pierogi. Schall’s is a dreamy world of tension between structure and the ephemeral. His series of large-scale drawings each include surreal or otherwise off-kilter light sources. In “Eidophusikon” a large screen is illuminated from behind, leaving the front stage in the dark. A gap in a bridge mid-construction spills a waterfall of liquid light in “Hoover Dam.”

Many of Schall’s drawings feature cage-like structures that impossibly enclose clouds or explosions. The combination of his forceful solid lines with soft fuzzy strokes creates a balanced yet unsettling image. Unanchored by horizon line, these object studies float and cast shadows on an undefined white space. The bursting motion of permeable matter sure to escape its precarious bounds incites a tick of anxiety. Schall further warps physics and scale by pairing his explosive clouds with traditional still life subjects—a Fabergé egg, an ornately carved wooden box, a mason jar. The absence of color throughout his work maintains a cohesive sense of silence. The specificity of his tone almost masks his raw drawing skill, which is worth attention in itself.

Wall Cloud is on view at Pierogi in Williamsburg until October 9^th

Paul Henry Ramirez

Paul Henry Ramirez's "Playconics 4" 2011 via Galerie Richard

During its 21-year history Paris’ Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard has been a platform for emerging and mid-career artists to blossom. Last Thursday the gallery opened its New York branch. With a shortened name, Galerie Richard's inaugural event was a well-attended opening for Paul Henry Ramirez’s first solo exhibition in four years, PLAYCONICS.

The artist describes his paintings as “biogeomorphic abstractions.” The cartoonish, geometric paintings look like a multi-colored lava lamp of sexual anatomy. They have an animated quality as the abstract innuendos morph and flow towards and away from each other. The clear and perfect lines give the impression that Ramirez is illustrating the physics of some alternate world.

Be sure to ask for gloves in order to participate in the interactive TIPSY paintings, a selection of works that are rigged up so the viewer may spin the canvasses to view different compositions of the abstractions.

PLAYCONICS is on view at Galerie Richard in Chelsea until October 15^th.

Jaume Plensa

Jaume Plensa Echo, photograph by James Ewing via Madison Square Park Conservancy

The Madison Square Park Conservancy has extended the duration of its current commissioned work from Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, who has bestowed upon the park its largest monolithic work in its seven-year history as a public art space. In the center of the Oval Lawn, the forty-foot tall bust called Echo depicts a young girl from the artist’s Barcelona neighborhood in a pensive dream state. Plensa also references a Greek myth in which Zeus’ wife Hera punishes the garrulous nymph Echo to repeat only the words of others.

The sculpture's peaceful quality is slightly disturbed by a vertical stretch of its proportions. Made of polyester resin, fiberglass and marble dust, Echo is a monochromatic non-reflective chalky white. The distortion coupled with the color make the sculpture look like a 3D hologram when lit up at night. For such a large-scale object, a 360 degree viewing is essential to take in the varying backdrops and details, like a nearly hidden braid molded to her neck.

See more of Plensa’s works here and see Echo on view until September 11^th in Madison Square Park.

Maureen Shields

Maureen Shields "HBAC2009" via Maureen Shields

About Glamour is a multifunctional platform for creative expression in fashion, music, design, and art in both a shop and exhibition space. Through the store filled with one of a kind new and vintage clothing, accessories, and livingware, AG Gallery currently welcomes San Francisco’s Maureen Shields. At first glance, her collages on wood panels and vintage porcelain plates depict cheerful technicolor worlds. But up close, her pieces whirl a carnival-like blend of humor, delight, and terror. She layers the animal kingdom with early civilization, the modern manmade world, and abstraction to create a visual timeline that describes a place by compressing thousands of years of its existence into a single image that unnerves as it amuses.

Shields “seeks to reintroduce the strangeness and complexity associated with childhood.” Indeed her eye for assembling familiar imagery into the unexpected does conjure a childlike bewilderment that we wish to absorb and resolve. But her use of faded paper collage and neon acrylics appears to be an expression specific to a Gen Xer reconciling the experience of growing up in a rapidly changing world that in remembrance feels like time travel.

Maureen Shields: Collages is on view at AG Gallery in Williamsburg through October 30th

GeekDown

Matt Richard, The "Impressionists" via GeekDown

Technological themes are ubiquitous in contemporary art. Artworks often force the viewer to mourn the casualties of the digital age—attention spans, connectedness, sense of time, space, and memory. They challenge us to reconcile the absurdity of our practices and expectations, and how quickly they recalibrate themselves as technology progresses (see Arcangel). Such sentiments have inspired art for centuries, and reasonably, now more than ever it seems.

GeekDown is an antidote to the dystopic vision we’ve come to expect from art that highlights technology as medium and/or subject. The exhibition at 92YTribeca presents a showcase of young minds from NYU and RISD that hark back to the kids section of the science museum, where we were excited to learn through interaction, delighted and inspired all at once.

One standout is Nick Yulman’s "Song Cabinet," an interactive mechanical musical installation. Atop an old wooden cabinet a card reads “please open drawers.” Each drawer is rigged up to play sound with various knick knacks, sea shells, a xylophone. More complex beats emerge the farther the drawer is pulled out of the cabinet.

Another favorite is Jack Kalish and Yonatan Ben Simhon’s "Illumination." From afar, the installation seems to be a writing desk with an overhead lamp shining on a clipboard. Up close the lampshade houses a light projector and downward facing camera. The viewer is invited to place any printed text on the clipboard. The camera takes a photo, which is downloaded to an OCR (optical character recognition) script that scans the page. The words are processed by an algorithm that contains a model of grammatical structures taken from thousands of existing works of literature and poetry. After scanning for these patterns, the projector lights up single words on the page to reveal a poem.

Refreshingly unfocused on the Internet, nor on nostalgia of analog technologies, the exhibit instead contains stimulating work that combines artful concepts with technical ambition and prowess.

See GeekDown at 92Y Tribeca before it ends on September 9^th

Lisa Nankivil: Lines of Inference

Lisa Nankivil, The Aerialist, 2011 via Spanierman Modern

Abstractionist Lisa Nankivil might wake up feeling green one day. She begins there, then walks away for a while, returns, and continues improvising until she completes another lush, colorful world. In her latest exhibition Lines of Inference, Nankivil creates stripes with brushes aided by blades, squeegees, planks of cardboard and wood, and a T-square on wheels. Sometimes she scrapes and smudges lines together, or drips paint and lets gravity do the work. The varied tones of paint and techniques of application produce a clear tension between surface and deep space. At the same time the consistency of lines in an innumerable rainbow of solid, blended, bright, and muted colors create a contrast of order and chaos. A completely different viewing experience emerges as the viewer steps away and fine lines become indiscernible.

See a complete gallery of works from Lines of Inference and an interview with Nankivil.

Lines of Inference is now on view at Spainerman Modern in Midtown through September 2^nd.

David LaChapelle: From Darkness to Light

"Adam & Eve" installation view via David LaChapelle

In From Darkness to Light, David LaChapelle hopes to “resuscitate the figure from its current state of commodity.” The photographer and director actually began his artistic career in galleries before Andy Warhol launched him into fame with a job at Interview Magazine. Like Warhol, LaChapelle playfully splashes in both commercial and conceptual puddles to stir together a highly distinctive concoction.

At the Lever House lobby, LaChapelle takes his primary medium of photography back to kindergarten art class with paper chains, collage, and stickers. In “Chain of Life,” LaChapelle replaces construction paper with photographs of the human form, stapled together into swooping and cascading strings that create a celebratory visual of human connectedness. In “Raft of Illusion, Raging Toward Truth,” he combines watercolor, pencil, paper, and glossy prints of his own staged photographs and mounts them on varying numbers of cardboard layers to create a 3D take on French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa. Epic in both size and subject, the ceiling-high collage of cut outs and art class materials showcases LaChapelle’s eye for the surreal. In “Adam & Eve” he arranges tinted translucent stickers of nudes into two circles (separated by sex) on the glass walls of the lobby. The forms swim around each other in a distinctly cell-like mosaic that create an effect of a church’s stained glass window through a microscope, conjuring at once images of science and religion. LaChapelle’s vision of interconnectedness and enlightenment through a youthful lens makes for a compelling experience.

From Darkness to Light is now on view at Lever House in midtown through September 30th.

Amy Joy Watson

Untitled, 2011, balsa, watercolor, thread, balloon via Amy Joy Watson

The central intrigue of Australian sculptor Amy Joy Watson’s works lies in the irony that transforming childlike dreams into physical reality requires an adult patience and refinement. The unwavering dedication and vision is palpable in viewing her latest group of sculptures, Big Rock Candy Mountain. The structure of her wildly jubilant world is comprised of multi-colored fine cuts of balsa wood, hand-stitched with needle and thread. Her choice to stain wood with watercolor in lieu of a palette of harsh neons and crisp acrylics serves to conjure images of faded alphabet blocks.

Another central contrast in Watson’s creations is their inherent structural allusions to something technological and futuristic; like architectural mock ups from another planet or time, that are constructed by hand out of the basest of materials. Analog materials of wood, needle, and thread are stitched into a digital Willy Wonka universe, as if a 21^st century Oompa Loompa's early 3D renderings of everlasting gobstoppers were blown up into an otherworldly scale, to be transmitted into a million little pieces through Wonkavision. A playful relationship between hard and soft, and jagged and round pervades her pieces. A geometric orb is tied to a perfectly spherical pink helium balloon. Hundreds of hard wooden panels take the form of a ribbon's organic drape.

There is something life-affirming is Watson’s sculptures. They are magical artifacts of an undying child-like imagination that matures into a dedicated artistic vision. She honors the spirit of her former self with tools she’s gathered along the way. In a somewhat literal representation of such, she constructs a winged clam-like cradle that holds a gobstopper candy. The luxurious and precious preservation of frivolity makes Watson’s work hard to resist.

See the Big Rock Candy Mountain gallery

Never gonna let you down

Jason Bard Yarmosky, "Fanny" and "Harry", 2009

Jason Bryant, "Love's Labor Lost; Epilogue", 2011

Allie Rex, "Plate 22"

Fresh from the wildly popular exhibition of Matt Stone's Tectonics, Like the Spice has every reason to celebrate. Their 5 year anniversary show Never gonna let you down showcases an impressive 40 artists (including Stone). They've curated an eclectic mix of painting, drawing, mixed media and sculpture that feels, quite honestly, exhilarating to walk through. It's not too often that a group show this large doesn't feel daunting, but instead coherent and inspiring. Some standouts include Allie Rex, Jason Bard Yarmosky, and Jason Bryant. See all works on the Like the Spice blog.

Never gonna let you down is now on at Like the Spice through the weekend.