Zanele Muholi’s towering self-portrait dramatically dominates her ‘Hail, the Dark Lioness’ photo series at Yancey Richardson Gallery, challenging viewers to reconcile the South African artist-activist’s ‘exotic’ characters with political realities in Africa and the US. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 9th).
The screen and the stretcher come crashing together in Jacqueline Humphrey’s new oil paintings featuring characters and numbers. Applied through laser-cut stencils, the thickly textured symbols spread across the canvas like a dense fog, at times arranged to resemble brush strokes. (On view at Greene Naftali Gallery through Dec 16th).
If you climb up to the fourth floor of Marc Straus Gallery expecting to find strange things in the attic spaces, Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculptural rendition of scored poppy plants dripping latex won’t disappoint. Surrounded by rubber sculptures of packing crates, perhaps hiding even stranger cargo, the piece comes as an otherworldly surprise. (On the Lower East Side through Dec 10th).
For years, Florian Maier-Aichen stayed dedicated to analogue approaches to photography; his latest digital images – created with Photoshop’s Lasso tool – have the joyful energy of a new convert. (On view at 303 Gallery in Chelsea through Dec 22nd).
Antoine Catala’s charmingly strange solo show at 47 Canal remakes emojis as extra-terrestrial faces adorning ‘breathing’ socks and shopping bags. Commenting on what he sees as emojis’ sudden ubiquitous and alien presence in our lives, Catala asks what damage is occurring (band-aids are a theme) and how much ‘cute’ we’re willing to consume at what cost. (On view on the Lower East Side through Dec 17th).
