For many folks, a family get-together is more of a responsibility than a choice activity of leisure. While people so often take their own family’s traditions and history for granted, artist Anthony Goicolea chooses to dig extensively into his for inspiration in his exhibition series, Related. A recent trip to Cuba connected the Atlanta-born, Pratt Institute-educated, first generation American to his cultural and familial past, the result of which drew feelings of both dislocation and nostalgia. Culver City’s Sandroni Rey Gallery showcases the third installment of the New York-based artist’s ongoing series, a collection of manipulated photography, painting, and installation conveying his subsequent associations to his Cuban roots.

Most of Related III uses found family portraits (mostly of individuals) as a basis for Goicolea to create hypothetical and fantastical moments which become manifestations of his own version of truth gleaned from the Cuba visit. The particularly outstanding diptych Supper (2008) features a fictional dinner where idealized versions of family members from all different generations are represented. Goicolea does this by painting over photographs printed on canvas (in both negative and positive) in a strict gray-scale palette that makes his subjects stark and haunting. He uses this method again in Family Geometry (2008), a family tree in negative in which the family members seem emanate with light.

Prior to this collection, Goicolea was known for his manipulated photographs, which often featured multiple versions the artist himself in the guise of a rowdy schoolboy to speak about child sexuality and gender identity. In 2007, he exhibited Almost Safe with Postmasters in NYC and The Septemberists at Sandroni Rey, illustrating his series of dense environmental self portraits. While much of the sexuality is removed in the new series, Goicolea does revert to his photographic manipulation roots, re-imagining landscapes and architectural elements from photographs he took during the trip. The prolific and inspired artist draws these works into cohesion with the aforementioned ones by keeping his stark palette and adding touches of handiwork (painting, writing). The overall sensibility is split between the warmth of family association and icy cultural isolation.

It is a truism that artists see the world much differently than other people. But what about those artists whose eyes literally deceive them? It is not thought odd for a gifted musician to be blind, although we often grant them an additional aura of wonder. To be sure, the inability to see does not affect the ability to hear, or listen. A blind person playing the piano doesn’t have to see anything; he must only remember the sound produced at the spot where he just placed his fingers. The same logic applies to writers who are blind or can only see the physical world in limited hues–and there have been an admirable number of them. James Joyce, for one, claimed his blindness was the least important thing to have ever happened to him. John Milton, with braggadocio, claimed his was voluntary.

In contrast, the world of a blind visual artist must be a vastly different one. How does the photographer compose a frame of which he does not clearly see, or not see at all? What is the color palette of a painter who can only see variations of blue, green, and yellow? What does the world of the blind visual artist look like?

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Beth Campbell is currently showing her latest series of mobiles at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea. The series is accompanied by a show of large scale portraits by Ben Durham and Storm Tharp. Campbell is an inter-disciplinary artist committed to enhancing our awareness and perception of space through her intriguing objects and installations. Her hanging mobiles have a delicacy and gravity that become increasingly compelling as you notice their subtle movement. They are composed of steel wire of various diameters, lending a thread-like quality to some, while others seem heavier and more ponderous. The weighty whimsicality of the mobiles is alluring and evocative.

Campbell installed Beth Campbell: Following Room at the Whitney Museum of American Art which consisted of replicas of a reading room arranged in mirrored pairs and placed on a grid, playing with viewers’ perception. She received her M.F.A. from Ohio University and showed work earlier this year at Manifesta 7 in Trento, Italy. She has also worked with the New York Public Art Fund on the project Potential Store Fronts, which consisted of a repeating storefront on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

Her mobile series will remain on view at Nicole Klagsbrun until December 6th, 2008.

Currently on exhibition at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco is Maya Lin’s latest work, Systematic Landscapes. The exhibition features Lin’s most recent body of work including sculptures, drawings, and installations. In Systematic Landscapes, Lin carefully articulates topographical model-like sculptures of landscapes from ocean floors to mountain tops. Her poetic use of natural materials and scale pays a solemn homage to geography and the natural world. Lin is best known for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where she won the public design competition of 1981 at age 21. The black-granite, v-shaped monument of Lin’s conception creates a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the lost soldiers to the Vietnam War.

Since the erection of the monument, Lin has been a well-received figure in public and site specific art projects. During the 2000 Confluence Project, Lin created seven site-specific installations along the Columbia River Basin, the river which separates Washington and Oregon. The seven specific sites were chosen for their historic importance, each being a place of convergence, where Native Americans of the region met the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06. In addition, Lin sat on the jury of the World Trade Center Memorial project competition and remains an active alumna on projects at her Alma Mater, Yale University.

With Buenos Aires Photo, the international photography fair born of Arte al Dia Internacional, having just wrapped up on November 2nd, the photo world will amass once again in France next week for the opening of Paris Photo, arguably the most important photo fair of the year.

This year Paris Photo, which runs November 13th through 16th at the Carrousel Du Louvre, will fix its sights on the photography of Japan, having invited the entire Far East nation as its “guest of honor”, which frankly seems a bit lofty. The fair is exhibiting work by more than 130 Japanese photographers, an apparent record for any European venue thus far. Among the contemporary Japanese artists being spotlighted is Hiroshi Sugimoto, an impressive and prolific photographer, but hardly an unknown in the West. He is also opening a solo exhibition this week at Gagosian Gallery, New York. FOIL Gallery of Tokyo will be presenting work by Rinko Kawauchi, another internationally recognized Japanese photographer, whose haunting renderings of fleeting insignificances have even inspired Paris Photo to use an image from her UTATANE series as part of their marketing campaign.

This year, aside from their celebrated interest in the East, Paris Photo will be including a record number of first-time exhibitors, the majority of which are from outside of France. With all major art fairs becoming more and more international in their programs, exhibitor lists, and even press materials, it is a welcome gesture from a leader in the photography world such as Paris Photo to be now on trend.

Mend: love, life, & loss, featuring ten nationally recognized fiber artists, opened at the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday, October 24. Curator Mark Sloan has brought together works substantiated by a variety of non-traditional materials, such as hair, thread, fabric, paper, and plastic, many of which are marginalized by their use as craft supplies or in historically female trades. The hand crafting of these objects is essential to their meaning, and many address the body itself, examining its interior mysteriousness and the cultural assembly of form. Stitching, used as a meticulous and meditative process, reveals the rich meaning of “mend”. These artists use their works as a means of healing, but also examine or subvert the objects and concepts that they’re fixing up. Decoration becomes conceptual.

Pinky:MM Bass

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SAKS, a new gallery which opened this year in Geneva, Switzerland is currently presenting a new series of paintings and pastels from New York-based artist Sarah Davis. The artist has rendered this new series of work from specific paparazzi images that unsuspectedly catch young women like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton in compromising situations. The series focuses as much on the predatory practices of the photographers and all prevailing surveillance that these young women are subjected to as much as the characters themselves.

Davis is a graduate of the School of the Visual Art in Chicago and has completed recent solo exhibitions at Michael Steinburg Fine Art and East Galley, both in New York City. This year, the artist exhibited with ExitArt Summer Mixtape Volume Two.