Featuring works from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art collection created mostly in the 1980s and ’90s by artists including Chris Burden, Alfredo Jaar, Louise Lawler, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Adrian Piper, this exhibition reveals the continuing resonance and complexity of topics such as freedom of expression, militarism, the dynamics of race, human and economic consequences of globalization, and other defining elements of society today.

Included in the USA Today exhibition is Adrian Piper’s video installation, Cornered, a work that draws the viewer in with Piper’s calmly-delivered monologue on her own racial identity and leaves the viewer with the potent question, “what are you going to do with this information?” Several drawings from Jim Shaw’s Aestheticized Disaster series display images of conflict and mass destruction. Taken from photographs in newspapers or magazines, the careful reconstitutions of these images in graphite neutralize the violence or chaos of people’s lives. Howardena Pindell’s collage Rambo Real Estate: Homelessness poignantly comments on social and economic challenges that are as significant today as in 1987, when the work was made.

The exhibition also includes work by Dennis Adams, Chris Burden, Andreas Gursky, Robert Heinecken, Alfredo Jaar, Gabriel Kuri, Dan Peterman, Michel Rovner, and Greg Stimac, among others. Several groupings of artists’ books and archival materials from the MCA’s extensive collection complete the presentation including works by Joseph Beuys, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono, and Martha Rosler.

USA Today is co-curated by Elizabeth Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at MCA, and Tricia Van Eck, Curatorial Coordinator and Curator of Artists’ Books.

Currently on view at Simon Preston Gallery in New York is a solo show of three new works by Brooklyn based artist Michelle Lopez. The exhibition, entitled The Violent Bear It Away, directly references Flannery O’Connor’s eponymously titled 1960 novel, which deals achingly and complexly with theological themes. O’Connor’s title, in turn, references the Bible verse Matthew 11:12 (Douay-Rheims). The theme of baptism imbues Lopez’s new work on view, specifically the piece Woadsonner (edit), which is essentially a “reborn” work, executed by Lopez in 2000, which was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The original piece (Woadsonner), a leather-covered car, has been crushed almost beyond recognition and now leans against the gallery wall, almost as if it is about to slide to the floor in exhaustion. One might wonder how this reconfigured sculpture , which seems to have really only been given a hard beating and new positioning, reflects the themes implied by The Violent Bear It Away, but as it is explained, Lopez is reacting to her artistic past through her reworking of something that she once created. She has rid the piece of its pop art playfulness and stripped it of the beauty it once held. In effect she has returned the piece, and her artistic practice, to a state of rawness and vulnerability that might parallel that of a spiritual rebirth.

Michelle Lopez received her MFA from The School of Visual Arts, New York and her BA from Columbia University. Lopez has had solo exhibitions at LA>< ART in Los Angeles, Deitch Projects in New York and Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, among others. She currently teaches at the Graduate Program of Painting and Sculpture at The School of Visual Arts. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Time Out New York, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Artist, Daniel Gordon, creates amazingly innovative, albeit low-tech photographs. His photos begin as cheaply printed internet-based images constructed into temporary sculptures which are re-photographed for their final presentation. The process resembles something from Frankenstein’s studio, as the artist assembles body parts and objects to reconfigure them in an endless cycle of creation. During a much anticipated visit, DailyServing.com had the pleasure to meet the artist in his Brooklyn-based studio to catch a rare glimpse of his unique process.

Daniel Gordon graduated from Yale University School of Art in 2005 and has since exhibited with Zach Feuer Gallery in New York and Groeflin Maag in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. The artist is currently presenting new work in the exhibition Portrait Studio with Groeflin Maag in Zurich, on view through April 10th. This year, Gordon was selected for the annual New Photography exhibition, opening this fall, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition will highlight a selection of only six young artists who each address the concept of image collection, assembly, and manipulation beginning in the studio or darkroom. For more information, check out Daniel’s previous feature on DailyServing.

Kutlug Ataman, a winner of this year’s Abraaj Capital Art Prize, recently awarded at Art Dubai, recorded a performance entitled Strange Space using himself as subject wandering through the desert blindfolded and barefoot. The performance, part of his most recent project Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, was inspired by a classical Mesopotamian folk tale, in which the hero is blinded by the love of the female character and condemned to walk the desert searching for her, only to burst into flames when they finally encounter one another. Ataman uses this ancient tale to symbolize the coming together of East and West, or as the fair’s catalogue states, “as a metaphor for the encounter of modernity and tradition, for their reciprocal attraction and the trauma this attraction may cause.”

Stella Lai‘s paintings are so bright and lush that it’s easy to get lost in their beauty, and not notice the macabre cast of characters lurking in the background, until it’s too late. Each piece is delivered to the viewer with a smile and a wink–inviting us in to play, but not telling us what game. In classical poses, women sit atop Lilly pads or wander in winter wonderlands, only things are never quite as they should be. Born in Hong Kong and currently living in Los Angeles, Stella Lai is a graduate of California College of the Arts who has exhibited internationally, and whose work currently graces the cover of Giant Robot Magazine, and has been seen in VOGUE China and Flash Art.

DailyServing.com’s Allison Gibson recently got a chance to pick Lai’s brain about her multinational inspirations and the hidden messages found in the worlds she creates.

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Currently on view at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco is new work on paper by artist Alex Lukas in the exhibition titled and another shall rise to take her place. The artist creates mixed media works, produced with ink, acrylic, gouache and silkscreen, often on book pages, which depict city-scapes submerged in rising water and desolate lands that are void of human presence. The works, which have a tranquil yet ominous tenor, explore a new placement in the history of landscape painting. Though never experienced first hand by the artist, the works seem to resonate with contemporary disaster imagery, often seen on television and through news sources. The new works evoke a very plausible scenario, which depicts the potential future for a new American landscape.

Lukas is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and founded Cantab Publishing in January 2001. The artist has completed the recent exhibitions In Defense of Home, In Defense of Industry at Iceberger in San Francisco and Wreck at Installations at EMF in Cambridge.

Closing today at the Scion Installation Space in Culver City is Sao Paulo a group exhibition curated by Choque Cultural Gallery featuring the work of nine artists from Sao Paulo. The exhibition, which mixed on-site creations with work that was shipped in, offered wide artistic diversity and provided some insight into the artistic activity that is currently present in that city.

Scion’s following exhibition PaperShapers, curated by Giant Robot, will feature 10 artists who each work with paper, as opposed to on paper. The exhibition, which opens early April, is said to contain several innovative works that push the boundary of this material. PaperShapers will be on view from April 11 to May 2, 2009.