Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist shouts for help in several languages, adding, ‘I am a worm and you are a flower!’ as she reaches up from a burning pit of lava in this 1994 video at the New Museum. Part of Rist’s retrospective exhibition, it’s a tiny but powerful appeal to our empathic natures. (On the Lower East Side through Jan 15th).
Veteran painter Susan Rothenberg’s huge red bird is an arresting standout in a solo show stocked with tense paintings of animals in intense, fraught colors. (At Sperone Westwater Gallery through Dec 20th).
Rome-based artist Giacinto Occhionero creates his atmospheric abstractions by applying orbs of spray paint to the back of Plexi, then adding layers of color. Here, he evokes both a moonlit night and a fiery sunset as seen from a terrace. (At Kristen Lorello Gallery through Dec 22nd).
An LED lighting strip turns Miguel Abreu Gallery an eerie green color, illuminating a puddle of synthetic liquid based on a pigment found in rainforest worms. Accompanied by a soundtrack of Amazon jungle noise played backwards, this installation by young Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz creates a surprisingly atmospheric faux-natural environment on the Lower East Side. (Through Dec 22nd).
Young painter Loie Hollowell depicts the nude body as landscape in a way that evokes Judy Chicago’s core imagery and Georgia O’Keeffe’s eroticized flower paintings and western landscapes. Here, Deep Canyon offers a road into the unknown. (At Feuer Mesler Gallery on the Lower East Side through Dec 18th).
