LA video artist Doug Aitken, known for ambitious projects like his film projections on the exterior walls of MoMA and the Hirshhorn Museum, has created a smaller scale but no less intense installation piece for his latest show at 303 Gallery in Chelsea. The centerpiece is ‘Sonic Fountain,’ which allows drips to fall from the ceiling into a hole dug in the gallery floor in patterns that create a song that’s been likened to breathing. (Through March 23rd).
A cement truck crashes on an empty highway whose grey surface is mirrored in the air, the red color from the hood bleeds onto the roadway, forming a colorful abstraction, while a skinny kid in an astronaut’s helmet looks on. It could only be a painting by David Humphry, whose signature mix of abstraction and realism, saturated colors and colliding stories awaken possibilities for strange stories. (At Fredricks & Freiser through Jan 19th).
‘Fresh, direct and very much of this moment,’ is how the New York Times described Brooklyn artist Keltie Ferris’ show of large, digital-looking handmade oil and acrylic paintings at Chelsea’s Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Blurs of sprayed paint suggest a plane’s vapor trail while carefully painted pixel-like blocks of yellow-orange color lend the painting a jumpy energy. (Through Jan 12th.)
Danish painter Tal R translates the world into more vibrant colors in paintings which give everyday places a fairground appeal, albeit a slightly foreboding one. In ‘The Minute,’ the biomorphic shapes of the clouds suggest strange happenings while a dark corner looks like the folded corner of a book page. (At Chelsea’s Cheim & Read Gallery through January 12th.)
For a decade, Trenton Doyle Hancock’s busy, messy and captivating collages told the tales of his invented creatures – the Mounds and the Vegans. He leaves those characters behind in his latest solo show at Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery, but not before making this disconcerting self-portrait in which his eye and mostly removed face emerges from the open maw of a screaming, striped Mound. (through Dec 22nd)