Laura Amussen

GETTYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg College In Laura Amussen’s recent exhibition, nature provided relief from the pressures of an increasingly stressful world. The works in this intimate, meditative installation were formed from twigs, leaves, reeds, moss, and seeds. The walls were painted a dark red-brown color, the earthiness reinforced by low lighting focused only on the objects.

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Diana Al-Hadid

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA Mills College Art Museum and San Jose Museum of Art Simultaneously delicate and monumental, familiar and inexplicably strange, Diana Al-Hadid’s work draws on an astounding range of cultural references, only some of which are visible to the naked eye. Fragments of images from paintings, often of biblical subjects, as well as allusions to literature, history, architecture, and science, all invest her sculpture with a backstory.

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Foon Sham

WASHINGTON, DC American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center Foon Sham’s sculptures evoke a myriad of forms–towers, vessels, baskets, grottoes, mountains, and even tornadoes. Often spiraling upward or outward, his works are built with layered wood, and they are participatory. Since the 1990s, he has created structures that invite viewers into intimate, light-dappled, and wood-scented spaces. Part of the thrill of his work is entering it– a sometimes acrobatic feat when faced with low, jagged passageways.

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“Politicizing Space”

NEW YORK Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice “Politicizing Space,” curated by Charlotta Kotik, took as its premise the fact that space can be made political by manmade interventions and used to control human movement and behavior. Kotik emphasized the need to understand how this stratagem works in light of Trump administration policies such as the Mexican border wall.

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Zheng Lu

NEW YORK Sundaram Tagore Gallery A first impression of Zheng Lu’s recent exhibition, “Undercurrent,” brought to mind the term “sublime.” Set against pristine white walls, huge silvery waves seemed about to crash through space. The obvious association was to Hokusai’s 19th-century print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but stylistically, Zheng’s waves have more in common with Northern Song black ink painting, adapted in Japan as Sumi-e, whose sharply delineated brushwork has been compared to samurai sword strokes by the prominent Asian scholar Sherman E. Lee.

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Tove Storch

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery Danish sculptor Tove Storch app roaches sculpture as a way of thinking about materials and looking at space. Arguably, so do all sculptors, but Storch harks back to Minimalists and post-Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Jackie Winsor in her refusal to allow thoughts about anything else to intrude on her work. The content of Storch’s work is, quite simply, space and stuff, presented within the theater of the gallery.

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