Fujita makes material before he makes anything…

“MY CONSTRUCTIONS ARE experiments in holding materialist, feminist, and socialist ideals simultaneously,” says New York–based Krieger of her approach. “I’m interested in what alternate economies can look and feel like.”…

Nancy Shaver uses and reorganizes the material chaos of our visually saturated everyday. As an assemblage artist, she weaves together found patterns and refashions them into eclectic juxtapositions of disorderly order…

Brooklyn was also strongly represented by Soloway gallery, which had a luminous new Graham Collins stitched canvas in their booth. Each shape within this geometric abstraction was cut from a different thrift store painting and added to the mix…

This Billyburg gallery, devoted to emerging young talents, describes itself as "a space created and run by artists." Its name comes from a plumbing and heating business that used to occupy the storefront location.

An exhibition and performance space run by artists Tomer Aluf, Derek Franklin, Annette Wehrhahn, and Emily Weiner, Soloway Gallery is situated in a former plumbing supply store…

For “LIVE/WORK,” Annette Wehrhahn shows a new series of paintings and other propositions that revisit the indeterminable boundary between the space dedicated to living and the space for work — with the products of each infiltrating each other as equals…

Munro Galloway’s recent exhibition at Soloway, entitled Belief System, begins with a Surrealist prompt and ends with pure pigment, rich and untethered. The show’s point of ingress is a photograph of André Breton’s acclaimed collection of objects: a shrunken head in front of a hybrid-machine portrait by Picabia, wooden Oceanic sculpture alongside Giacometti’s “Boule Suspendue,” hunting tools of Intuit trappers, and other flea market detritus…

The brain is the king of the organs. The brain’s shape and structure define our humanity, though its method of governance over our bodies and actions remains largely a mystery. In “Belief System” at Soloway Gallery, Munro Galloway bares his brain. It’s not preserved in a jar for our scientific prodding; instead he slowly and intimately reveals it in glimpses, repetitions, and uncertainties. The accumulation of these revelations is confounding. “Belief System” includes works on canvas, drawings and books, with Galloway moving fluidly between different media…

The press release for “Kristan Kennedy Meets a Clock,” at Brooklyn’s Soloway gallery, defiantly proclaims, “All the paintings have been made, even the embarrassing ones.” T.R.N.T. (2014) is one of those on view that refers less explicitly to bodies, though all the works are rather haptic. Kennedy, a Portland-based artist, here nods to textiles and, more, to gendered divisions of labor. After staining and collaging on sheets of linen with ink, enamel, aluminum or other materials, Kennedy throws her paintings into the washing machine to age them via an aleatory gesture weighted with feminist overtones…

Kristan Kennedy’s New York solo debut is a tour de force of painterly process. Kennedy works on unstretched, unraveling expanses of raw Belgian linen—soaking, machine washing, scrubbing, and occasionally brushing sumi, dye, and pigment into the tawny, textured material for months at a time. Within their final state, color and form swirl and fade, melting before our eyes into an atmospheric vision punctuated by flimsy skims of gesso and bits of road-crushed aluminum that cling to the surfaces like scabby jewels. The work’s intense dialectic of beauty and repulsion mirrors the artist’s philosophical struggles—we sense that both artist and artwork have gone through the wringer—together—to achieve the hard-won grace so palpable in the work…

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to see a Tracy + the Plastics show, you know that Tracy as well as the two Plastics are all played by Wynne Greenwood and that a show is not only about music but also these three characters, with Tracy appearing live and the Plastics—named Nikki and Cola—as video projections. The three chat, theorize, complain, and stand around in what critic and curator Johanna Burton called, in Artforum in 2005, a “split-personality hallucination,” or perhaps a kind of ventriloquism performed with the artist’s own body…

“This unconventional 2013 show stood out like a dead mouse in a box of McNuggets. Her resolutely amateur aesthetic feels like a punch to our blingy culture’s flabby gut. Disembodied head sculptures (below) made with soccer balls and cardboard punctuated this gallery’s space with an uneasy comic violence. Her characters also starred in twin projections where they acted out aggressively disjointed conversations (Greenwood’s own voice) behind a powerfully spartan soundtrack. The fact that some artists like Greenwood still can–and want to–provoke is a gift that I will take into 2014.”

The mutable nature of things serves as a philosophical jumping-off point of sorts for Rodman's mixed-media constructions, paintings and works of paper. Rodman was born in 1973 and, like a lot of artists who are his age or younger, there's a certain provisional, even throwaway quality to his pieces, which mix imagery and abstraction as well as the occasional found object. As varied as his works appear to be, however, they are carefully tied together by the repetition of formal motifs.

What do the streets, storefronts and bodegas of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, have to do with the deserts of southern California? It’s a question that the sculptor Halsey Rodman, who grew up in Davis, Calif., has been considering a lot lately, with two related projects in these radically opposed environments…

In the mid-2000s, Wynne Greenwood‘s video persona sparked an adolescent idolatry in me that really started everything. In Tracey + The Plastics, Greenwood’s three-person electro-pop band, she played all the characters, performing live shows in conversation with pre-recorded projections of herself. Watching Greenwood essentially talk to herself through Tracy, Nikki, and Cola, I was delivered a vision of the millennial queer future in which we now routinely commune with our fantasy selves through the veil of the screen…

“Some Redemptions,” a group show curated by artist Josef Strau, is framed by a text that acts as both Strau’s proposal for the exhibition and a piece within it. Cut up and positioned between the other works on view, the text is a meditation on the artist’s attempt to redeem his work from “the consequences of his own production.” At stake is not only redemption but also the “salvation” of the artist, which Strau proposes as “an idea to save the idea before the production from its production.”…

New York-based Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto gained attention for her multimedium installation/performances at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. More recently, her first solo exhibition in New York featured humble dollar-store materials in an expansive, ephemeral installation of sound and sculpture titled “Talking in Circles in Talking.” The gallery walls were transformed into a climbing-wall-cum-whiteboard, creating a backdrop for several performances.

Packed into a small gallery in Brooklyn, sound-amplified water drips beside me from an ice block suspended above a pair of stainless steel mixing bowls. I am waiting for the start of Aki Sasamoto’s performance at Soloway Gallery, wondering where she’ll find the space to maneuver in this sea of bodies and hanging sculptures. Suddenly, quietly, the artist appears behind me in a rolling chair…

Imagine the aftermath of a large slumber party at an Ikea store…