Opening this evening at Gallery Nucleus in Los Angles will be an exhibition celebrating the release of Beautiful / Decay‘s Book One: Supernaturalism. The popular magazine is now presenting a new ad-free book format with expanded coverage. The exhibition will feature new work by several of the artists found in Book One including Kyle Thomas, Ben Tegel, David Jien, and DailyServing’s Seth Curcio. Each Beautiful / Decay book has a hand drawn cover by the artist Kyle Thomas, and he will be signing and taking requests for custom, one of a kind covers for each attendee at the event. The exhibition will be on view from July 25th through August 8th.

The Frith Street Gallery in London is currently showing the Raqs Media Collective exhibition, Escapement. The word ‘escapement’ refers to the mechanism of a clock that controls the counting of time. This appropriately titled new multimedia installation, like other work by the prolific Raqs Media Collective, engages with issues of globalization. As new technologies bring us closer together than ever before, circumventing the once isolating condition of geography, how do humans understand their place in the world? While Escapement does not fully answer such a broad and difficult question, it brings possibilities into the gallery space.

Escapement features twenty-seven, LED-lit clocks hung on the gallery walls with accompanying looped video and sound. The clocks, labelled from cities around the world, illustrate the immensity of the world’s latitudes and longitudes. Mimicking the effects of globalization, these geographies, as represented by the clocks, are condensed into the gallery setting. As Monica Narula, a member of the Raq Media Collective, notes, walking through the installation is like traveling the breadth of our globe. Each of the clocks feature emotions or states of being in lieu of numbers. Such descriptives as ‘duty’, ‘anxiety’, ‘ecstasy’ or ‘remorse’ are experiences common to the condition of mankind no matter the geographic location.

The clocks surround four centrally located flat screen monitors, which are placed around a column. The screens feature an expressionless, androgynous face that glides across the screen — in and out of the picture plane. Any of the range of emotions featured on the wall’s clocks or from one’s own experiences could be projected onto the neutral face. The accompanying sound features a heart beat, which Monica Narula notes in an interview with Frith Street Gallery, is one of the most fundamental ways of measuring time and existence. This heart beat is layered with artificial sounds of everyday life, including doorbells and printers. The common thread of these technologically produced sounds is that they serve to connect people.

The placement of the human image at the center of the room points to the reality that we may be the center of our own universe, but we are also just one in a world of billions. Escapement seems to suggest that our humanity transcends the technologies of globalization and that we can find peace with the world’s many changes through our commonalities and increasing interconnectedness.

The Raqs Media Collective was founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They are based in New Delhi and are also members of the Sarai Reader series collective. The Raq Media Collective’s artwork and curating projects are shown internationally. They were recently featured in the group exhibitions Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2008) and A Question of Evidence at Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2008/2009). Their solo exhibition Lightbox will open at Tate Britain this September.

Escapement will be on view at the Frith Street Gallery through 30 September 2009.

Scott McFarland‘s photo series, A Cultivated View, now exhibiting at the National Gallery of Canada, documents sculpted Vancouver gardens. The images, as carefully controlled as the gardens they depict, are strangely insidious. Unlike the nature photographers and National Geographic features he mimics, McFarland makes landscaped spaces seem absurd, like deceitfully calm settings for Wes Anderson films.

Sponsored by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP), A Cultivated View was accompanied by an interview between CMCP Associate Curator Andrea Kunard and McFarland which is archived on the Museum’s website. In it, McFarland discusses his approach to light, his choice of subjects, and “compositional pleasure,” among other ideas. A Cultivated View will remain on display through September 13th.

Aicon Gallery in London recently opened Space Invader, a group exhibition featuring the work of Vibha Galhotra, Mayyur Gupta, Dan Holdsworth, Caroline McCarthy, Alan Michael, Muzzumil Ruheel and Sanatan Saha. Space Invader explores how our personal space becomes crowded and confused due to our ever-expanding cultural requirements. In all facets of life, we are met with a barrage of activity, which can come in the form of pollution, overpopulation, and even electronic and data overload. This exhibition provides a moment to evaluate the changes in our culture and to remind us of what is altered or lost in the course of our progression.

Vibha Galhotra’s installation, Neo-Camouflage, 2009, is composed of digital prints on vinyl and fabric and mannequins, suggesting how individuals are overwhelmed by and lose their identity within the chaos of the city. The artist, born in India in 1978, is influenced by the perpetual construction and re-building taking place in Delhi, the second largest metropolis in India. Neo-Camouflage also alludes to the growing security and surveillance industries.

Dan Holdsworth, who currently lives and works in London, is showing two photographs in Space Invader, one of a field of communication poles situated in a snowy field and the other of a partially constructed motorway viaduct cutting through the arid landscape of Granada. Holdsworth often juxtaposes the modern footprint with the natural landscape. Holdsworth studied Photography at London College of Printing. His work is included in several public collections, among them, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Gallery, in London, and the Centre Pompidou Collection in Paris.

Space Invader will remain at Aicon Gallery in London until September 5, 2009.

Eric Yahnker recently opened a solo show at Seattle’s Ambach and Rice Gallery. Though his ouevre spans a motley crew of materials and techniques, his modus operandi tends to favor elaborately laborious processes that can be best described as artistic one-liners. This surprising element of going above and beyond to create such elaborate jokes lend the works a two-sided element of both hilarity and seriousness, in their dedication to tell the joke. Yahnker’s practices range from the absurd, such as re-writing a book on the habits of highly effective people with his foot, to virtuosic in craftmanship–creating sumptuous, beautifully executed charcoal on paper drawings on such subject matter as well, bare bums and turd hats. It’s almost like hiring an entire fleet of the world’s most pre-eminent sculptors and artisans to commission a gold plated whoppee cushion. Of course, this unusual dichotomy as far as sentiment and fabrication is precisely what lends Yahnker’s works such a thrilling complexity. Yahnker’s unique brand of smarter-than-thou humor is a burst of fresh air- a rare blend of intelligence and sophistication, with maybe just one slyly glinting pretensious gold tooth of well-warranted scorn lurking behind his pearly grin. DailyServing’s Sasha Lee had a chance to sit down with the Los Angeles-based artist and discuss his process and the role of comedy in his work.

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Using the principles of graphic design, painter and silk screen printer Ryan McGinness creates elaborate two dimensional works and room-filled installations that are dense with iconography, language and product symbolism. Corporate logos, graffiti and elements of art history serve as inspiration for the artist’s prints, vinyl decals, wall murals and commercial objects. McGinness has recently produced several publications featuring his work including No Sin/No Future, Ryan McGinness Works and Aesthetic Comfort. Next year, the artist will present the exhibition Studio Franchise at La Casa Encendida in Madrid and Art History is Not Linear, on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Bay Area-based artist and graphic designer Brett Amory recently completed one of Fecal Face dot Gallery‘s summer IN-N-OUT gallery exhibitions. During his week-long exhibition, which was on view from June 17 through the 20th, Amory presented 12 new paintings. Eight of the works are based on one of the artist’s dreams, featuring a girl that becomes stuck between the physical world and a spiritual realm, while the remaining works are from a previous series titled Waiting. Each piece is characterized by a highly graphic and reductive environment inhabited by one or more figures. Often semi-deconstructed into pure formalism, Armory’s paintings invoke a lonesome psychological state with ghostly images and transient figures, punctuated by highly graphic structures.

Brett Amory is a graduate of the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. This year, the artist has or will exhibit works at Fabric 8, Southern Exposure, and Hyde Street Gallery, each in San Francisco. Recent interviews with the artist can be found on FecalFace.com and Sour Harvest.