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

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.