Light and space artist Doug Wheeler’s installation at David Zwirner Gallery makes light a transformative medium, turning the white cube into a glowing and changeable environment to challenge the senses. Light disperses before our eyes as it fades from the bright glow of neon tubes installed in a recessed space to the darker areas of the wall, floor and ceiling at the end of the long rectangular gallery. (On view in Chelsea through March 21st).
A metal panel bolted closed on a grimy subway wall, a garage door and barred windows of an industrial building and other snapshots of the built environment are among the inspirations for Jane South’s new wall-mounted assemblages at Spencer Brownstone Gallery. Posted to her Instagram account as #streetsources and #subwaysources, the photos speak to the long and varied life of the structures surrounding us as translated into canvas, tarp, batting and other materials. (On view on the Lower East Side through April 5th).
Proto-surrealist James Ensor and the fantastical Netherlandish painter Hieronymous Bosch figure as influencers on Chicago Imagist Gladys Nilsson’s odd characters, no surprise, given their pervading oddness and ambiguous identities. This symmetrically arranged meeting of two couples, elderly, possibly blind, and with facial features straight out of a folk tale challenges belief even before spotting the tiny horns tucked into their mouths. Are they communicating in honks? Are they tooting at each other to avoid colliding on the sidewalk? The fun is in the guessing. (A selection of work from 1963 to 1980 is now on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea through April 18th).
Abraham Lincoln morphs into a teenager, a senior, a woman in glasses and other characters in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s ‘A House Divided…’, as interviews shot with a variety of Staten Island citizens with varying political views are projected onto two replica of the Lincoln Memorial at Chelsea’s Galerie Lelong. In some exchanges, friends acknowledge their differences while respecting each other; in other conversations, barriers remain high. Wodiczko’s goal is to encourage the exchange regardless, making dialogue the goal of his art production. (On view through March 7th).
Taking in stray cats changed young artist Fumika Koda’s painting career, focusing her practice on the feline subjects and driving her to find intimate ways to portray their habits and personalities, often in connection to the seasons. Koda even aims to empower the cats, as she puts it, “…giving them their power back over the people who left them,” but it’s her evident respect for the cats’ beauty and intelligence that stands out. (On view at Sato Sakura Gallery through March 28th).
