It is a rare moment when an elusive street artist agrees to display a collection of works in the space of a white-box gallery. Stolen Land, the current exhibition at Needles & Pens Gallery in San Fransisco features the work of the infamous street-based painter Other. He is known for his spray-painted and wheat-pasted figures that appear on buildings and in train yards throughout the country. Other challenges the traditional notions of graffiti and the cultural associations of street art by creating somber characters made of photo realism contrasting flat elements of abstraction.

The Canadian-born artist began to create his unique work on the streets of Toronto in the late 1980’s. Since then, he has managed to create and display his work internationally in the cities of Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Bucharest, Fez, and Lima. Many of these works continue to travel through endless rail systems, having the opportunity to be revealed to a massive audience that would have otherwise never experienced it.

South African-born artist Robin Rhode works in a variety of media, including performance, photography, sculpture and video that centers on his personal experiences as a young man growing up in Johannesburg suburbs. The artist uses and alters everyday objects that reference South African products or that embodies a personal or social connection to the artist. The artist’s newest body of work continues his interest in exploring narratives where he uses only the most basic of materials to complete his ideas. Recently, the artist has expanded to 16mm film and sculpture and has created a collaborative performance in Rheims, France, with professional dancer Jean-Baptiste Andre and violinist and cellist Didier Pertit. This year, the artist presented Empty Pockets at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York City , an exhibition that debuted in Johannesburg in March and at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in April.

Rhode has exhibited internationally, including notable shows with Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

The cryptic sounds of hidden nature, wild animals, and native cultures are not only found in the numerous stacks at the Library of Congress or between the grooves of an exotica record. Artist Walter Kitundu utilizes these very sounds and ideas in his acute musical compositions. Sound artist, instrument maker, and composer, Kitundu finds a harmony between traditional musical forms, nature and sculpture. He has created an array of instruments including the Phonoharp, a multi-stringed instrument made from a record player, and the Ocean Edge Device, a life-size structure which utilizes wave motions to create a composition. These elements and Kitundu’s fascination with birds, geology, water, and air have led to various projects and installations throughout the United States and Europe.

The Bay Area artist is a 2008 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and is a current artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. Kitundu has collaborated widely with notable artists and musicians such as Matmos and Kronos Quartet and has been appointed the 2008 Wornick Visiting Distinguished Professor of Wood Arts at California College of the Arts.

Can an exhibition generate a motion picture in the minds of its viewers? This question was asked to visitors of the exhibition, As Above So Below currently exhibiting at San Francisco’s Photo Epicenter gallery. A cacophony of stimulation, the exhibition features work by over twenty international and domestic artists working in various mediums. The assorted ideas found in As Above So Below are drawn from the epic eruption of the Chaiten volcano in Chile during a lightning storm in May 2008. Nature, electricity, enigmatic messages, and alchemic theories are seen through sculptures (most notably, a large smoking paper mache volcano), reconfigured photographs, left handed paintings, digital lightning graphs, various texts, and a family play which was acted out and recorded by artists and gallery-goers during opening night. Curator Chris Fitzpatrick creates an electric atmosphere, a playful display of objects, an interactive project, and most certainly a film (of sorts) with all conventions left at the door.

As Above So Below is on display until December 12th when the exhibition will close with as much force as it opened, featuring two simultaneous performances of Van Halen’s “Eruption” on the electric guitar, surprise appearances and disappearances of artworks, and the release of a catalogue.

Currently on view at Galeria Thames in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood of Buenos Aires, is a solo exhibition of paintings by Rosemarie Allers, entitled es fetichista tu obra. An anomaly occurrence in the art world, the crowded opening of Allers’ exhibition, under the direction of Mabel Ibarra, resulted in an overwhelming number of red dots and discussions. This, beyond the usual consumption of wine and cheese, which was being handed out generously. Allers’ work has the power to push far beyond the role of a backdrop and demand the viewers full attention. The sensuous paintings recall Picasso in a rather overt way, but lack any sense of actual or intentional appropriation. Manic scenes of lust bleed into chaotic depictions of overlapping figures. People are more than often defined in Allers’ paintings by sketched black outlines and punches of red lips, stalkings or heels. In Hombre protegido (“Protected man”), we are invited to view an episode of passion– seemingly throwing love, lust, hate and hurt up for grabs– as androgynous female figures crowd over an indifferent looking man, crying and entangling their limbs. Informed by her protracted background in theater, Allers brings drama to her work in a very narrative manner, telling three acts worth of stories within a two dimensional plane. Es fetichista tu obra is on view at Galeria Thames through November 25th.

Rosemarie Allers was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has exhibited internationally at The National Art Gallery Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, Argentina; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; SOHO20 Gallery in New York, among many others, and is in several private and public collections throughout the world.

The new James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai is currently exhibiting work by Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong. The artist’s large scale narrative installations often reference themes of war, big business, and global greed, as well as the history of art. This particular body of work takes Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory and applies it to competition between the nations.

The new work, entitled Thousand Years Business as Usual, includes three sculptural tableaux composed of industrial Styrofoam and Polyurethane insulation foam. The main installation, Early Years, consists of 7 anthropomorphized monkeys arranged in a loose circle, alluding to Matisse’s The Dance of 1901. They are precariously positioned atop oil barrels, with one foot suspended in the air. Covered with a sloppy application of black pigment, these simian characters appear to be plucked from a horror movie. This circular format not only quotes a Modern master, but also references the cycle of life and evolutionary (and artistic) progression. In addition to their role in evolutionary theory, monkeys are also the most versatile sign in the Chinese zodiac. In Business As Usual-The Tower, 3 monkeys are stacked one on top of the other on an oil barrel, miming the cautionary statement “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.”

De Jong’s choice of materials holds symbolic significance, for the insulation itself is a petroleum product. Styrofoam has no sculptural precedent and was originally used by Americans in World War II to create blue lift rafts that were barely visible on the water. After the war, Styrofoam was absorbed into our daily lives after several companies developed the “Styrofoam Plan” in the 50s, an effort to replace other materials. War leads to innovation and progress and slowly this technology is incorporated into mass culture. While both Styrofoam and Polyurethane are mixed with the same chemical components, Styrofoam has a rigid closed cell structure, while the Polyurethane foam allows the artist to develop more organic forms due to its fluidity.

Folkert de Jong studied at the Academy of Visual Arts and the Rijksacademy for Visual Arts, both in Amsterdam, where the artist currently lives and works. He has had several solo shows, one at James Cohan in New York last year as well as Peres Projects in Berlin. de Jong won the Prix de Rome in 2003 for sculpture and has been influenced by artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix. DailyServing has featured the artist twice, in 2006 and 2007.

Thousand Years Business as Usual will remain at James Cohan in Shanghai until January 17, 2009.

Russian-born artist, Shimon Okshteyn, is currently presenting a series of new paintings in an exhibition with Stefan Stux Gallery in New York City. Dangerous Pleasures: New Paintings and Sculptures marks an expansion of the artist’s previous series which depicted representations of old master paintings. In Dangerous Pleasures, Okshteyn has rendered several large-scale hyper-real paintings depicting the intoxicating vices of contemporary life. Works titled, Heroin, Cocaine, Ecstasy and Pills, are formed from thick paints on the reflective surfaces of glass and mirror. The reflective surface also acts as a catalyst for self awareness, forcing a confrontation between the viewer and the vices, further pushing the question, “Is my happiness really only one pill away?”

The artist was born in the former Soviet Union in 1951 and emigrated in the U.S. in 1980. The artist recently completed a traveling retrospective exhibition which was organized by the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The artist is also in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY.