Video artist Guy Ben-Ner is a year-long inhabitant of MASS MoCA‘s galleries. His exhibition Thursday the 12th, on view from May 2009 through March 2010, explores family life and imagination, while also questioning culturally proscribed lifestyles. One video, Stealing Beauty, plays like a conventional family sitcom, except that the setting is Ikea store displays in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Another video reinterprets Truffaut’s 1970 film L’enfant Sauvage, placing the wild boy’s natural habitat in the family kitchen (instead of an actual forest) and having the father (instead of Truffaut’s patient doctor), cultivate the boy.

Guy Ben-Ner was born in Ramat Gan, Israel. He studied at Hamidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College before going on to receive an MFA at New York’s Columbia University. The 2006 recipient of a DAAD Grant, Ben-Ner has exhibited at the Venice Biennial, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv.

Gerard Hemsworth is currently presenting his first solo museum exhibition in the United States titled Hidden Agenda. The London-based artist will have fifteen new works on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield Connecticut through January 2010. On the surface, Hemsworth’s painting seem playful, innocent, and rather benign, but over several decades the artist has built a visual vocabulary which allows him to questions elements of art production that range from modernist painting to storybook illustrations. The flat, graphic and reductive works indeed have a hidden agenda, seducing viewers through simplicity while opening a dialogue about high art and cultural values. The absurdity of Hemsworth’s images coupled with the familiarity of the artist’s chosen style beckon the viewer to question the meaning of other related imagery in both art history and contemporary society.

Gerard Hemsworth lives and works in London, where he is the Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London. The artist has completed recent solo exhibitions with Galeria Luis Serpa Projectos in Lisbon and Galeria Brito Cimino in Sao Paulo.

On view through September 14th at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York is a solo exhibition of works by acclaimed artist Michael Joaquin Grey. The artist’s work explores ideas related to art, science, media and human imagination, with this exhibition specifically focusing on the development of language, living things, and strategic organic systems. The exhibition is located on P.S.1’s first floor Drawing Gallery and includes works such as Artificial Muscle and Perpetual ZOOZ. Artificial Muscle contains a sample of the artist’s own muscle cells which are used to create a contracting mass, while Perpetual ZOOZ features the sound of his mother’s heartbeat played in time with a version of the Wizard of OZ film, while simultaneously a version of the film plays in reverse in accordance to Grey’s own heart beat. In total, the exhibition spans many topics thorough several works in the form of wall vinyl, computational videos, sculptures and prints.

Michael Joaquin Grey has completed countless solo and group exhibitions with recent notable shows at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles and Bitforms Gallery in New York. The artist currently lives and works in San Francisco and New York.

Creating Identity: Portraits Today is the title of a new exhibition currently on view at the 21c Museum in Louisville Kentucky. 21c is the first museum in the United States to exclusively exhibit works made in the twenty-first century. Creating Identity brings together 37 artist who explore a variety of concepts through contemporary portraiture through over seventy exhibited pieces. Among the all-star list of featured artists are Chuck Close, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Ruud van Empel, Loretta Lux, Pieter Hugo, Carrie Mae Weems, and Nathalia Edenmont whose work is pictured above. The exhibition focuses on artists who are attempting to reinvent the genre of portraiture by reevaluating how to capture identity through contemporary media, while abandoning direct representation for conceptual experimentation. The show expresses “the bombardment of media imagery, loosening of gender stereotypes, and reconsiderations of race” through the medium of portraiture and explores “how artists today are using these challenges in their photography, sculpture, painting, video, and other art forms to redefine our ideas of representation.”

Creating Identity: Portraits Today will be on view through December 31, 2009.

At the site of the infamous 1982 Keith Haring mural located at the corner of Houston Street and Bowery, is the second installment of an ongoing mural program organized by Deitch Projects and Goldman Properties. On view from this July through March 31, 2010, is a large mural by Brazilian-born identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo, otherwise known as Os Gemeos. The massive wall painting contains many of the characters popularized by the artists’ work. Common everyday scenes from the artists’ lives are mixes with explosive abstract patterns and vivid psychedelic colors. About the work, the artists’ have stated “we only report scenes from a magic, love and real place that live inside us, a real dream, the scene of our own universe.”

Os Gemeos have been featured in countless publications, and have been including in a wide range of international solo and group exhibitions. They are represented by Deitch Projects in NYC and Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Denver-based sound artist Jim Green currently has a solo presentation in the Project Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO. Thematically, the new work on view, titled Unplugged, investigates the discomfort we feel in public spaces when confronted with private issues, and the practiced reactions we impel when met with such taboo circumstances. Okay, Unplugged is essentially about the sound farts make. And it’s reported that visitors to the show are actually having fun at a museum viewing this work of contemporary art–a grievously unique event, I would lament. Green displays the knee-slapping song of a grid of colorful Whoopee Cushions with almost medical precision, like so many oxygen tanks humming mechanically in a hospital corridor. What Denver area appreciators refer to as their “local hero”‘s genius,” is a marked attempt at defying the ideal that art and humor (especially humor that can be purchased in a bin from the 99 Cents Store) are not mutually exclusive. If you are unable to make it to Denver this week, there is a video of the installation found here.

Jim Green holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Minnesota (1970) and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Colorado (1978). He was two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Media Arts. Sight-specific commissions of his work are installed in cities throughout the United States, including Laughing Escalator at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver and Singing Sinks in the restrooms of the Denver Art Museum, CO. As part of the exhibition Extended Remix at MCA Denver, his outdoor installation Affirmative Greetings welcomed unassuming passers-bye with compliments and wishes for a nice day, while Courtesy Phone, a red telephone, inconspicuously installed on the gallery wall, connected anybody who picked up the receiver to the artist’s cell phone.

Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery in Rome is eight new works by internationally acclaimed photographer Cindy Sherman. For this body of work, the artist continues to serve as her own model, transforming herself into a variety of personalities and exploring a myriad of identities. For her current series, Sherman is investigating the wealthy middle-aged American woman who is at her social prime. Wealth and social status seems to protect the women and allows them to be virtually invulnerable to the outside world, much in the way that nobility has been captured historically through portrait painting. However, similar to how high-definition television can reveal a newscasters every flaw, these large-format photographs expose every blemish that these women adorn. The artist has stated, “I think they are the most realistic characters I have done. I completely empathised with them. They could be me. That’s what was really scary, how easy it was to make myself look like that.”

Cindy Sherman currently lives and woks in New York. She has completed countless international museum and gallery exhibitions with recent works on view at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Denmark and the Jeu de Paume in Paris among others.