This isn’t the first time Lisa Kirk has explored capitalism’s underbelly, but now, more than ever, her audience is primed to go with her. Invisible-Exports, the Lower East Side gallery that seems to have been named with Kirk in mind, is the site of the artist’s current installation House of Cards. The gallery’s office has been turned into a “functioning” real estate sales office (salespeople included) and the main exhibition space is now home to a “shanty timeshare,” a structure built of found materials that looks like a mix between a child’s ramshackle club house and living quarters from third world slum. Anyone who buys in to Kirk’s installation (literally–the salespeople are selling shares of House of Cards) will be able to personally experience shanty living once the installation is relocated. Ultimately, the shanty will be disassembled and distributed among share holders.

An underground installation of Revolution, an upside-down fragrance lab that doubled as terrorist headquarters originally exhibited at PS1 Contemporary, will accompany House of Cards. Kirk has exhibited at Galeria Comercial, PR, MOT International, London, and Participant INC., NY, among other venues. She lives and works in New York.

ART DUBAI, one of the most important contemporary art fairs in the United Arab Emirates, has officially opened at the luxurious Madinat Jumeirah Hotel in Dubai. The third installment of the fair showcases 68 galleries (from over 250 applicants) from the Middle East and around the globe. The fair has three main components: two exhibition halls, the underground project space ‘Art Park’, as well as video installations. The Global Art Forum, taking place in a large tent located on the beach a few steps away from the entrance to the fair, is an initiative of Art Dubai launched in 2007, bringing together the brightest and best in contemporary art in an impressive series of panel discussions and interviews. The fair, drawing artists, gallerists, scholars, collectors and connoisseurs alike, underscores the incredible and exponential outpouring of artistic and cultural energy from Dubai, providing a stimulating stage for cultural discourse and discussion of the fast fusion between East and West.

Over the next few days, DailyServing.com’s Rebekah Drysdale will be reporting from Dubai as she visits Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennel.

Lalla Essaydi‘s mesmerizing calligraphic portrait series, Les Femmes du Maroc, explores and empowers Arab female identity by cleverly employing the sacred Islamic art form reserved for men. A product of cultural fusion, Essaydi was born in Morocco and lived in Saudi Arabia for several years before moving to Boston to receive her B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1999. She then received her M.F.A. in Painting and Photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University.

The written text is partly autobiographical, referencing personal experiences and thoughts from the artist’s past and present. The inscriptions are applied with henna ink which is used for daily and ceremonial purposes and typically associated with women, underscoring the subversive nature of the series. In a society where women are defined by the presence of men, Essaydi literally breaks the silence with her intricate and labyrinthine language.

The work seen above, Les Femmes du Maroc #27, can be viewed at Art Dubai in the Agial Art Gallery booth. Several other works from the series are displayed in the Edwynn Houk Gallery booth, a gallery representing the artist in New York.

On view through April 5, 2009 at the Chicago Cultural Center is House of the Rising Sun, an installation of paintings by the collaborative duo of Robert Davis and Michael Langlois.

Though their output primarily consists of paintings, the pair also collaborates to create sculpture and large-scale installations with a conceptual bent. Their scrupulously crafted, whimsical and stinging paintings explore the lowbrow with a fastidious fixation on the human figure as it undergoes psychological or physical stress. Their work is replete with historical and pop culture characters, loving family portraits, controversial icons, and hard core sensibilities.

For this exhibition, a small number of related paintings are presented in a similar but new configuration from their 2008 exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles, under the same title. Among the works on view is Babylon, a large canvas depicting among other things female nudes, airliners, oil derricks, and a pig fucking a goose, all rendered in shades of blue. While this painting is displayed centrally in the gallery space, it is flanked on either side by two smaller paintings to round out the installation: Face of God, and Dads.

Robert Davis and Michael Langlois have been collaborating as artists since they met at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and divide their time between Chicago and Brooklyn.

Swedish painter, Sigrid Sandstrom, exhibits twelve of her newest abstract paintings at The Company in downtown Los Angeles from March 14th through April 18th. Sandstrom’s strength is revealing the paradoxical in both painting and nature. Even the artist’s preferred technique is an oxymoron–the transparent layering of opaque whites. Decision making, editing, working, and reworking are crucial elements of Sandstrom’s finished work. She purposefully leaves behind squeegee smears, paint drips, and brush marks that not only reference her process, but also signifies her work. Milky acrylic washes, often of snowcapped mountains and angular glaciers, sit underneath layers of planar geometric shapes. The polygonal shapes contrast in a variety of ways: irregular vs. regular, convex vs. concave, and rough/torn edges vs. hard/masked edges. Though the shapes are painted, they are made to look as though they are torn paper collage, textured pieces of wood, or see-through strips of masking tape. The shapes’ faux edges are yet another reference to painterly fabrication and thus, process. In her artist statement, Sandstrom mentions ” the cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which, in turn, insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.” By constantly juggling interactive variables, the artist explores the self-reflexive nature of decision-making and the creative process.

In 1997, Sandstrom received her B.F.A. from Academie Minerva in The Netherlands, and in 2001, an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University. She is the 2008 recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation: Painters and Sculptors Grant as well as the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Sandstrom’s paintings are in permanent collections at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita KS; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Currently, she lives and works in Stockholm.

Jonathan Owen’s current solo exhibition at the Doggerfisher Gallery features new works by the artist. Throughout the show, Owen alters everyday images through acute attention to detail. Owen’s largest piece, Untitled, was painstakingly constructed by Owen of foam board, wood, and paint. Its pattern, inspired by the chip found on European credit cards, epitomizes the artist’s preoccupation with motif pulled from everyday existence. This work as well as the Untitiled lamp reference the mass-production of image and the theme of money defines their appearance.

Owen alters the ubiquitous, utilitarian wine rack and coat stand through meticulous addition and deconstruction. He has placed hand-carved wooden chain links within the wine rack to render it useless. The carefully overturned coat stand hooks are completely removed from their suppor–connected only through a wooden chain.

The exhibition also includes removed book pages that are partially erased by Owen using a blade and a piece of rubber. All of these pages once held an image of a civic monument. Some monuments are erased completely, while a ghost-like outline remains upon other pages. Through the deductive act of erasure Owen forces the viewer to question collective memory.

In 2000, Jonathan Owen graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art with an MFA and received the John Watson Prize from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The artist currently lives and works in Edinburgh. Look for Owen’s work at the Talbot Rice Gallery‘s Round Room in 2010.

Travelers, 2008, oil on linen, 77 x 62 x 1 1/4 inches

David Zwirner in Chelsea is currently presenting several recent large scale oil paintings by contemporary American figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage in her second solo show at the gallery. Since receiving her M.F.A. at Yale in 1986, Yuskavage has shown her work across the world and is included in several major museum collections. Works included in this gallery exhibition are PieFace (2008), Travellers (2008), Figure in Interior (2008), Snowman (2008), Reclining Nude (2009), The Smoker (2008), Pond (2007), among others, in addition to small oil paintings, including Figure in Landscape (2008) and Chrissy (2009).

Yuskavage began her career as a key part of a new figuration movement taking place in the 1990s (the “Bad Painting” movement), which occurred when the glitz of the previous decade faded and painting became more personal and traditional. Other artists grouped in this movement include John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans. Yuskavage’s now iconic sexualized young females are painted in a refined style that recalls the technique and skill of the great masters. These female characters are given anatomical irregularities, such as bloated bellies and exaggerated breasts, but sustain some mesmerizing sexual appeal. They are placed into erotically charged settings and positions, forcing the viewer into a sometimes uncomfortable voyeuristic situation. Yuskavage’s suggestive subject matter and her employment of a kitschy soft core aesthetic highlight the artist’s impeccable technical ability.

Figure in Interior, 2008, oil on linen, 72 x 52 x 1 1/2 inches

In several works on display in the show, Yuskavage places her signature voluptuous beauties in mystical mountainous landscapes, sometimes accompanied by less prominent figures, as seen in Travelers, 2008. The vaporous lighting of the composition and the incomplete narrative suggested by the title trigger a slight feeling of unease, not unlike her earlier works. The artist has cleverly been able to maintain the critical balance between psychological and erotic content, but works such as Figure In Interior, 2008, call this balance into question with its salacious sensationalism.

The compositions representing interactions between two female figures are more psychologically compelling than the singular portraits, such as Teresa and Lauren, 2008, which depicts an impending encounter between two women in a warmly lit private chamber. The alluring glance of the woman looking back at us serves as both an easy entry to the rendezvous and a startling reminder of our fictional intrusion. The rousing exchange between these sapphic sirens is indicative of the artist’s continued ability to provide an undeniably stimulating experience.

Teresa and Lauren, 2008, oil on linen, 25 1/2 x 24 x 1 1/4 inches

Yuskavage was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and currently lives and works in New York where she is represented by David Zwirner. Over the past year, she has participated in group exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation and Thrust Projects in New York and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna.

Yuskavage’s paintings will remain at David Zwirner until March 28th.