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