SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Taraneh Hemami’s elegant window installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts translated a contentious season of contemporary politics into a dazzling and contemplative work. An enormous radiating star of laser-cut patterning filled the window with the ebullient celebration of the Arab Spring.
Pattie Porter Firestone
WASHINGTON, DC Katzen Art Center, American University Filling the Katzen Art Center’s “sculpture garden” is no easy task for an artist determined to present a coherent display of work. Intended as a light well to enhance the building, two L-shaped concrete rectangles offer no visual integration unless one stands at their juncture.
Greg Snider
VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA Deluge Contemporary Art Greg Snider’s eight “Models for the Public Sphere” are absurdist and visionary monuments to human, societal, and governmental follies, abominations, and questionable policies. Using the term “critical realism” to describe his approach, the Vancouver artist cleverly and humorously turns normality on its head in his meticulously crafted, speculative models.
Joe Ovelman
WASHINGTON, DC Conner Contemporary Clean-cut yet reclaimed, familiar yet odd, tectonic yet intimate—these were some of the contradictions at play in Joe Ovelman’s recent exhibition. Seemingly a far cry from earlier work, these sculptures tackle similar issues of sexual identity and societal norms, but in a more subversive and, ultimately, more tantalizing way.
Douglas Paulson and Ward Shelley
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park There was a time when “art” meant sculpture and painting, and “craft” meant useful things like pottery and glassmaking. Any such distinction has grown from fuzzy to non-existent. And now Douglas Paulson and Ward Shelley are intent on erasing boundaries between art and carpentry.
Linda Fleming and Diana Al-Hadid
RENO Nevada Museum of Art The Nevada Museum of Art, in conjunction with its second triennial Art + Environment conference, filled its galleries with exhibitions that investigated “our relationships with natural, built, and digital environments.”
Adrian Saxe
SANTA MONICA Frank Lloyd Gallery While Adrian Saxe’s previous work embodied dual aspects of beauty—penetrating attraction and a natural link to the grotesque—the work in his recent exhibition, “GRIN,” is not easy on the eye. The sculptures are freeform Surrealist objects that make suspect everything that categorizes the sense of things.
Brad Miller
SANTA BARBARA Cabana Home At the core of Brad Miller’s unusually diverse work—ceramic vessels, “burn” paintings, site-specific installations—there is a principle shared by set theory, blastocoels (early dividing embryos), electron dispersions, computer programming, compositional aesthetics, and political economies.
Matt Hoyt
NEW YORK Bureau Matt Hoyt recently presented an inspired, albeit somewhat quizzical show of very, very small sculptures, arranged on shelves in Bureau’s diminutive Lower East Side space. These small wonders are striking in their specificity of form, repaying Hoyt’s considerable investment of time and labor.
