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.