Interstate: The American Road Trip
Socrates Sculpture Park, 30-01 Vernon Blvd, Long Island City
You may think a summer road trip only yields empty fast food containers, adolescent revelations, and asymmetrical tans, but the artists in Interstate have mined the experience to create a surprising and humorous exhibit. Starting at Andrea Zittel’s popular High Desert Test Sites event in the California desert and ending at the super-urban Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, these nine artists crossed the country collecting road signs, historical artifacts, and even highway guard rails. Carolina Pedraza’s bright green mailboxes wind along the park path while Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonenberg’s structure of pastel-painted street signs towers above. Two long stretches of guard rails enclose Virginia Poundstone’s Wildflower Median and Mark Klasson’s blue payphone sprouts off the dirt, promising a live connection to the Mojave Desert. Allison Smith’s cloth tent houses historical artifacts from living history museums, and R. Scott Mitchell’s rectangular prism mocks the monotonous, reflective surfaces of office parks. These twisted remnants of the open road could not be more out of place in the urban mayhem of Queens, but the contrast gives these sculptures visual drama and a dose of cheeky playfulness.

Local Transit:  An Exhibition in Two Parts
Artists Space, 38 Greene St, Soho
In another exhibit connecting distant places, the curators at Artists Space have traded artwork with Artspace in Auckland, New Zealand, to create two shows on the theme of location. The project is meant to provoke comparisons between the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery,’ implying that New York is the center of the universe, but in reality, it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between the New York and Auckland artists.  More interesting is the wide range of methods used in depicting landscapes and maps. Marie Lorenz presents a beautiful wooden canoe whose carved pieces can be run through a press to make woodblock prints of the Manhattan skyline. Dane Mitchell creates distorted maps of the world in which a country’s size reflects its number of museums, and Yuk King Tan forms images of buildings and people using small colored firecrackers. Barely relating to the idea of place, but perhaps the most charming of all, are Ellen Birrell’s photographs of wildly mutated lemons against colorful backdrops. In a separate show at Artists Space, Daniel Joglar hangs objects from the ceiling and makes subtly beautiful arrangements of office supplies on a tabletop.

f : t architecture : Model Space
Black & White Gallery, 483 Driggs Ave, Williamsburg

For the next few months, the courtyard of the Black & White Gallery will hold a gleaming white architectural confection. Built by the artist-curator-architects Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem of f : t architecture, the construction is a large-scale model of a house they’re building in Saugerties, New York. Working models are not normally sensational, but by blowing one up to 1: 4 scale and embedding it in a concrete backyard in Williamsburg, Franck and Triem have created something novel. Surrounded by clusters of aluminum rods representing trees, the minimalist form soars above a landscape of stacked white polystyrene. The combination of materials — I-beams, foam, Plexiglas — is strange, but the structure appears light and elegant nonetheless. The house is generically stylish, fusing Pierre Koenig with Zaha Hadid, but in miniature it becomes a symbol of escape, purity, and the endless allure of modernism.

Simon Faithfull: Ice Blink
Parker’s Box, 193 Grand St, Brooklyn

Before we even get to his art, Simon Faithfull deserves props for his sheer physical hardiness. He undertook a residency at a lonely British research station in Antarctica to make videos and Palm Pilot drawings of the desolate landscape. The Palm Pilot drawings are amazingly dexterous considering the medium — one captures the intricacies of the research station, another the gentle outline of a friend’s face. The videos range from jolty cinema verité footage of barking seals to clear, minimal shots from a fixed camera. In the latter category is 44, which records the view through a ship’s porthole as it slowly passes ice cliffs.  Similarly, Falling looks over the bow of a vessel as it plows through icy water, driving dark cracks into the white surface. All of the work is quiet and subdued, reveling in the severe beauty of the landscape.

Tara Donovan: New Work
Pace Wildenstein, 534 W. 25th St.

A lot of artwork on display in New York right now leans heavily on conceptual or narrative frameworks that send you running to the wall labels. The Whitney Biennial boasts the best examples (“an articulation of nostalgia and diligence reflecting ‘traditional,’ transcendental American values,” etc.), and this recurring trend is bogging down Chelsea as well. What a relief, then, to come across a show at Pace Wildenstein that is unapologetically sensual. From out on the street, Tara Donovan’s installation appears to be a glowing, white mountain range on the floor of the gallery. But the luminous topography is actually composed of stacks of clear plastic cups, arranged in gradations of height to simulate peaks and valleys over an area of 3,000 square feet. The piece is absurdly labor-intensive, but the labor generates mystery and a magical transformation of materials, which are welcome qualities in contemporary art.

Andrew Sexton
Oliver Kamm 5BE Gallery, 621 W.27th St.

The skulls, flames, lightning bolts, and Rottweilers in Andrew Sexton’s work might lead you to believe that he’s another artist obsessed with a goth-metal-Americana aesthetic. That may be, but the works in Sexton’s first solo show have a surprising element — they’re all portraits. The five-foot, steel handlebar mustache, which the receptionist will set on fire if you ask nicely, is a self-portrait. The arrangement of painted car doors, tequila, a live masseuse, and a Walkman with a soundtrack is meant to capture the personality of Michael Stickrod, a young video artist. The Crumb-like cartoon in ink and soy sauce portrays Adrian Wong, a classmate of Sexton and Stickrod in the Yale MFA program. All of the objects transcend easy classification by combining several different aesthetics — Louis Hopper includes a Cobra-shaped beer tap, a skull carved from cheddar cheese, a wall painting of lightning, and a skateboard. Despite the mish-mash of materials and forms, each portrait conveys a fondness for a loveable, albeit eccentric subject.

Cao Fei: Hip-Hop
Lombard-Freid Projects

A wildly talented young video artist from Guangzhou, China, Cao Fei is making a name for herself with her oddball satires of Chinese culture. Her lush Cosplayers video documents teenagers play-fighting in fanciful anime costumes, and her video Rabid Dogs, which was in the recent Armory Show, features Burberry-clad actors romping like dogs through a corporate office. This show at Lombard-Freid unveils a suite of three videos that see hip-hop colliding  with Asian culture. In Guangzhou, Fukuoka, and New York’s Chinatown, Fei cajoled local characters to dance uninhibitedly to hip-hop music, and most performed old-fashioned two-steps to the pounding beats. Her subjects are all endearingly out of sync with the music, which suggests, in the most entertaining way, the challenge of throwing together East and West, old and new. Fei, who has worked extensively in theater, constructed elaborate backdrops for each video; the Guangzhou piece is projected on hanging laundry, the Chinatown one on an overturned restaurant table, and the Fukuoka video between wall drawings of Japanese scenes. Her skills as a filmmaker aside, Fei provides a refreshing combination of humor and criticism in capturing China’s fast-changing role in global culture.

Ridykeulous
Participant, Inc.

Yes, that’s pronounced Ri-DYKE-ulous, and say it like you mean it! Definitely one of the angriest shows in a while, this joint curatorial effort by A.L. Steiner and Nicole Eisenman addresses the current status of lesbian culture in relation to the mainstream. The exhibit coincides with the release of a ‘zine of the same name, and both involve a multitude of artists, some of whom are not lesbians or even female, including Amy Sillman, Nicola Tyson, Chicks on Speed, Lisa Sanditz, and Miranda Lichtenstein. In the gallery space, the work all blurs together in a mass of fists sprouting from vaginas, smeared fake blood, and cutout photos of Shane from The L Word. Speaking of which, this raggedy, 90s-zine-style show is a refreshing change from that over-glamorized melodrama of lesbian life, and it’s a reminder that lesbianism does not have a comfortable place at mainstream culture’s table. However, this messy political expressionism, which the press release acknowledges as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, seems oddly retro and out of place today. Maybe contemporary art viewers have forgotten how to deal with angry minorities and we need to be reminded, or maybe the 21st century just requires a more sophisticated kind of political statement.

Roxanne Wolancz: The Princess Series
The Phatory, 618 E. 9th St.

In a narrow little space in Alphabet City, Sally Lelong runs the Phatory, a gallery specializing in artists who combine digital animation with painting and sculpture. In the current show, Princess Series, Roxanne Wolanczyck creates tongue-in-cheek Flash animations and digital prints about her fantasies of a better life. Wolanczyck’s use of the word “princess” is complicated: she casts herself as royalty to comment on the relative luxury of Americans, but her character is nonetheless struggling to make ends meet in New York. These candy-colored images are her imagined retreats from the daily grind: dressed in a nightgown with a white crown, Wolanczyck, her baby, and her cat wander through lush rainforests, green meadows, and fantasy homes. Basing her digital illustration on photographs, Wolanczyck creates forms that have realistic detail but are crisp and graphic. The most amusing prints are of her dream houses, which come in Modern, Japanese, Islamic, and Indian styles, and represent the domestic daydreams of many New Yorkers.

The Micro Museum
123 Smith St, Brooklyn

The Micro Museum, a collaborative project of the artist duo Kathleen and William Laziza, contains an alternate universe where chairs talk, organs light up, and televisions respond to touch. Since the early 1970s, Kathleen and William have been making interactive sound and video sculptures — their early work resembles Nam June Paik’s manipulated televisions — and in mid the 80s they set up this museum on Smith Street to house their installations and their collaborations with other artists. The most interesting pieces are the interactive televisions whose images can be manipulated by placing objects on the screen or yelling at the set. Many of the works generate psychedelic imagery, and the whole place feels like a vintage funhouse. The technical innovations are impressive, due to William’s engineering prowess, but the aesthetic is varied and exuberantly kitschy. The Lazizas organize a slew of cultural events every year, including their public access show, Spontaneous Combustion, for which they recruit young video artists with similarly imaginative taste. 

Space Boomerang
Swiss Institute
495 Broadway, Soho

For Space Boomerang, curator Marc-Olivier Wahler has turned the Swiss Institute gallery into a dark cave full of swirling smoke, weird smells, and startling vibrations. Named after the Boomerang nebula, the coldest known place in the universe, the show evokes a Space Odyssey-era fantasy about the cosmos. Like a newly discovered planet, the exhibition teems with strange, inanimate objects moving of their own accord. Lang/Baumann’s long wall of lights lends a retro-glam ambiance to the tableau and Loris Greaud’s Spirit fills the air with a slimy fragrance based on descriptions of Mars. Greaud’s other piece, Tremors are forever, generates disturbingly strong vibrations in one of the gallery walls, and next to it Ann Veronica Janssens’ Freak Star illuminates a star in a cloud of smoke. It’s theatrical and fun, like an old-fashioned haunted house — but that, miraculously enough, doesn’t cheapen the art. Instead, Wahler draws out the mystery and drama of artworks that may have seemed banal in a white cube.

Andrea Zittel: Critical Space
New Museum of Contemporary Art
556 W 22nd St

The first word that comes to mind in describing Andrea Zittel’s art is Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Artwork. Originally used by Richard Wagner to describe his integration of the arts, the term is just as appropriate for Zittel, who employs fashion design, architecture, interior design, cooking, painting, and sculpture to investigate the human need for order. Zittel asserts that self-imposed regulations can be more liberating than pure freedom, and uses her own lifestyle to test this idea. This show includes dozens of the dresses she makes, which she wears every day for six months, and several of the living units she designs for herself and for collectors. Combining California modernism and the modular principles of Le Corbusier, her living spaces are sleek and pint-sized. The living units never impressed me when I saw them in group shows, but in the context of her other work, they are connected to studies of animal breeding structures and to her extreme personal regimens. This retrospective proves that Zittel is one of the few artists who erases all boundaries between life and art.