Currently on view at the Cerasoli Gallery in Culver City, California is new work by artists John Grande, Franziska – Klotz and Nick Potter. Each artist has been given an individual gallery to present new paintings concurrently, while the exhibition loosely focuses on the various photographic genres that these artists reference within the work.

German-born Franziska Klotz creates figurative paintings that remain highly abstracted in her show titled Nowhere Right Here. The artist is developing an ongoing archive of snapshot imagery that she uses to construct her works. Many of the images come into focus slowly for the viewer, offering a rich depth both formally and through her ambiguous narratives.

Under the title Glamour and Gloom, John Grande has created a collection of paintings which mix fashion related imagery with a highly level of cinematic drama. The artist exploits archetypes of gender and beauty to reveal the many connections and contradictions in fashion and art.

Artist Nick Potter was born in England and creates reductive paintings which reference a variety of imagery ranging from still lives and interiors to figures. All of the paintings in his show Society of Spectacle are characterized by their cold isolation, which as the artist has stated, underscores a sense of anxiety within a post-Cold War society.

Each of these shows will be on view at Cerasoli Gallery from April 18 – May 13, 2009.

Christina Seely‘s interest in nature and the changing environment is seen through her vivid photographs. For an artist with a strong mind and an innovative way of translating her message, her photographs are remarkably reserved and still. Seely’s nighttime cityscapes are familiar and at the same time, evoke the sensation of jamais vu–where the commonplace becomes eerily unrecognizable–inviting the viewer into place of investigation. This year she will exhibit works from her ongoing landscape project, Lux, at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle and at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. DailyServing’s Arden Sherman had a chance to sit down with the San Francisco-based photographer and discuss her series Lux, her thoughts on the expansion of eco-awareness in today’s world, and the potential of potential.

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Recently opening at BELLWETHER in New York is an exhibition by Abbey Williams titled (STILL). In this body of work, Williams creates video portraits where she superimposes herself over a still image. In addition to these videos, she presents several multiple channel videos which Williams uses her figure to try to match the figure in the image, dissolving herself into art historical and pop culture imagery.

Wiliams’ work has referenced the work of feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle by using compiled images to address the representation of women in art. (STILL) focuses on female sexuality and vulnerability, directly responding to her personal experience of losing her child in labor.

Williams has had several solo shows, including projects with galleries such as Foxy Production in New York. Her work has been shown at Tate Britain in London, PS1 in New York and the Hammer Museum in LA. In 2004, she attended Skowhegan Residency Program after receiving her MFA from Bard College.

Opening this weekend in Brussles will be a new exhibition titled Against the Day by famed painter Luc Tuymans. WIELS will be presenting the first solo show in Brussels for the artist. The exhibition will feature twenty new paintings which were created specifically for the exhibition. The new paintings are a continuation of a previous series, which explores and manipulates television-based imagery through painting practices.

This year, the artist will have work in Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye (group show), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, Private Universes, Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, and Luc Tuymans at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Currently on view at Dallas’ PanAmerican ArtProjects, with one week remaining, is Aperture – A Photographic Opening. This group exhibition samples the work of six photographers including Andrea Cote, Gory, Daniel Joglar, Jane Martin, Pablo Soria, and Laura Wilson. Each artist employs a different photographic technique, ranging from Wilson’s more traditional landscapes to Cotes’ unconventional self-portraits.

Andrea Cote’s black and white digital self-portraits are indicative of her desire to engage multimedia. She works in photography, painting, video, and installation. Her time as an artist’s model influenced her view of the artist and subject. She explores the concerns of this relationship with sensitivity to pressures associated with the image of the body.

The color-toned photographs of Cuban born artist Gory focuses on process rather than product, suggesting we question the nature of reality.

PanAmerican’s mission is “to build a bridge between North and South American cultures by presenting and exhibiting artists from both regions concurrently” and the show does just this. It not only includes two Latin American artists and three Americans but both male and female, there is a wide range of representation. PA opened their doors in 1990 as Galerie Malraux in LA. In 1994, they moved to Dallas and have since established themselves in Miami as well.

The recent work of Amelie Chabannes is vivid, delicate, and contemplative, begging the question of identity. Her medium varies tremendously and includes sculpture, drawing, and painting. She attributes her technique to that of the automatic surrealists. Some of her drawings recall those of Andre Masson. This in mind, a thematic continuity emerges when looking at body of her work. Like those before her, Chabannes is intrigued by the ever-changing unconscious. She explores this subject and subsequently proves its infinite nature.

Her compositions are unique. Often there is a focal point created by bold color and rich patterns. These forms anchor the composition. The color can be described as bright, fruity, and intense. Meandering lines reflect exploration of the subject of identity, engaging endless possibilities.

Amelie Chabannes was born Paris and graduated ENSAD in 2000. She now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited around the world. She is represented by LUXE Gallery.

On view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery is Light, Time, Chemistry, an exhibition of work by Spencer Finch. In this exhibition, Finch references both phenomenology and the psychology of perception, capturing and re-contextualizing fleeting and ephemeral elements from our surroundings. Among the many works exhibited is Periscope, a photographic device composed of mirrors and ventilation ducts that extends from inside the gallery to the outside and allows visitors to view the changing sky. The periscope was used to expose a cyanotype directly on the wall of the gallery, creating a hazy blue image from a two-day exposure of the Chicago sky.

Also on display is Finch’s installation Shadow, Sculpture of Centaur, Tuileries (after Atget), a component of a larger body of work entitled Shadows (After Atget). In this work, Finch captures the ephemeral phenomenon of shadows, focusing specifically on re-creating light from locations of Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris. Employing a fluorescent tube lamp covered with colored filters of Isaac Newton’s spectrum, the light functions as a reverse prism, emitting the very polychrome grey light of the Parisian shadows photographed by Atget almost one hundred years ago.

Spencer Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He studied at Rhode Island School of Design, Hamilton College in New York and Doshisha University in Kyoto. Finch had a major solo exhibition What Time Is It On The Sun? at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts in 2007, which was accompanied by a monograph with essays by Susan Cross and Daniel Birnbaum. The artist will be a participant in the upcoming 53rd Venice Biennale this June.