Multiverse at the Claremont Museum of Art broaches cosmic mysteries in a surprisingly accessible, relevant manner. The exhibition, which opened September 21st, includes a multi-media array of thoughtful, visually arresting explorations of what is unknown and what is observable. Kerry Tribe re-imagines the Northern Lights; Jedediah Caesar deals with material density; Sebastiaan Bremer uses photography to explore memory’s intangibility.

In an email dialogue available on the Museum’s webpage, Sebastiaan Bremer discusses memory and what is real with Dr. Vatche Sahakian and Nancy Macko discusses astronomy and parallel universes with Dr. Stefan A. Naftilan–the artists take the role of question askers and proposition makers, while the scientists act as the answer givers. The dialogue gives a nuanced portrait of the earnestness with which these artists grapple with uncertainty and the cosmos. The exhibition also includes Sebastiaan Bremer, Violet Hopkins, Emre Huner, Miler Lagos, Nancy Macko, Carter Mull, Diana Thater, and Fred Tomaselli. Multiverse continues through December 28, 2008.

In Chicago, Carl Baratta‘s latest solo show Light Up and Be Wonderful is now on view at Western Exhibitions until November 15. Carl Baratta drops the viewer into open-ended narratives, primarily landscapes, where winds swirl menacingly, plant tendrils rise up from subterranean depths, rivers bend violently and mutant figures do battle or find themselves in desperate isolation. In addition to Baratta’s paint and color handling, he utilizes glam rock looks from the Seventies and rubber suits from Japanese monster movies to undercut the heaviness. In regard to his paintings Baratta states: “My open-ended narratives never seem to settle down. When each work is looked at in its entirety, it adds up to a simple conclusion: something is wrong. That’s the feeling I want to start with. The clues that are given won’t yield a solution; they are too busy bouncing off each other and only show how far-reaching the wrongness is. As the scene unfolds, this unnerving feeling ensures that each element and its constituent parts add up to a sense of energetic wonder. I depict imaginative worlds in moments of constant transition, creating a tension between static images and dynamic narrative. If things do not become fixed, they cannot be dismissed or forgotten.”

Carl Baratta’s recent shows have included a solo at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and group shows at the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles, Lump Gallery in North Carolina and Green Lantern in Chicago. Baratta received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and currently lives and works in Chicago.

Currently on view In Chicago is Amy Mayfield‘s installation Doog Vs. Live at threewalls. Mayfield’s exhibition marks the beginning of threewalls SOLO program for 2008/09, running until November 15th, 2008.

Known for her paintings that depict ecstatic landscapes located between terrifying and medicated, fear and joy, greed and grandeur, Amy Mayfield’s paintings employ personal-world symbolism to inform fantastic landscapes. Here for threewalls, Mayfield has moved off the substrate, turning the gallery into a funhouse that embodies the feminine, ornate and chaotic worlds that she cultivates in her paintings. Employing patchwork colors, decorative black patterning, photo collage, pins, house plants, a stacked wall of books, and sculptural blobs of poured paint, Mayfield manifests here an environment for the audience to enter and occupy. Mayfield will be giving an artist talk at threewalls October 30th at 6pm.

Amy Mayfield has exhibited her paintings throughout Chicago at Gahlberg Gallery, The Hyde Park Art Center, Bucket Rider and Zolla Lieberman Gallery as well as Franklin Parrasch in New York. In 2007 she exhibited in the MCA 12×12 series. Mayfield received her MFA from the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 where she was a recipient of several grants and scholarships.

In the decade since her breakout success in 1996, Liza Lou has won a $500,000 genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, kept a studio in Durban, South Africa, and continuously mesmerized the world’s critics and collectors. She works with millions of tiny glass beads, taking the traditionally craft-oriented medium and elevating it to astonishing artistic heights.

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Happy Lion Gallery in Los Angeles recently opened Marina Kappos‘ POLITICUS, an exhibition of new paintings inspired by the forthcoming Presidential Election. The artist’s style recalls that of Greek vase painters, her crisp imagery referencing politics, war, and the economic crisis. Her overlapping compositions provide layers of meaning, depicting both cultural history and daily life.

Kappos received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts in L.A. and her MFA from Yale University. She has previously exhibited at Haunch of Venison in London, I-20 and P.S.1 in New York, and Galleria Marabini in Bologna. Her current exhibition at Happy Lion will run until November 29, 2008.

Currently exhibiting at la BANK in Paris is a solo exhibition, entitled NO CASH/CASH, featuring two series of work by Juliana Beasley. Beasley, a former assistant of Annie Leibovitz, has become a notable photographer in her own right. The two series being shown at la BANK, Rockaway Park and Lapdancer, are seemingly polarities in terms of subject matter, but both cut to the heartbeat of what it is to be human and struggle, regardless of how that struggle manifests itself.

In Rockaway Park, the Jersey City photographer documents the faces of that fringe of the Queens population in a Leibovitz-esque style of portraiture, although capturing far less glamorous faces than those of the Hollywood stars shot by Leibovitz. These faces are not those gracing the covers of US Weekly, but those marginalized by a class seen above their own in both economic stature as well as broader social terms–predominantly found on the other end of the A train. One striking image, Last Stop Diner, seems to be made up of one part joy to two parts sorrow. The ubiquitous site of that scarf-covered white hair and red lipstick, maybe a little on the teeth, lives in the subconscious of others in the neighborhood, or in the bittersweet nostalgia of those who have since left the various Rockaway Parks of the world.

Lapdancer is taken from the 2003 book of the eponymous name. The series graphically captures the seediness of an establishment that lives within a time capsule of the late night hours, no matter how light it is outside. It documents the experience of the dancers and the anxious clientele in the coarsest and most honest of terms, omitting most traces of pleasure and leaving one grimacing at the sight of these scenes. NO CASH/CASH is on display until November 8th.

Juliana Beasley lives and works in Jersey City. A 1990 graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, her work is represented by Contact Press Images. Beasley is the recipient of numerous industry nominations and awards.

On October 8th, LACMA opened Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets–Sports and Masculinity, a survey exploring the intersection of masculinity and sports in contemporary culture and artistic practices.

Curated by Christopher Bedford (himself a player of rugby and American football), the show poses athleticism not in diametric opposition to artistic expression, but rather as a kind of male-dominated theatrical spectacle of gender performance. In Bedford’s accompanying exhibition article, he noted, “This new interest among practicing artists in the imagery of and materials associated with men’s sports can be traced to the increasingly polymorphous depictions of star athletes in the media. More and more often, popular magazines such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine publish portraits that lavish as much attention on the bodies and apparel of male athletes as has traditionally been accorded female models and celebrities endorsing cosmetics, clothing, and perfumes.”

This hypersexualization, or offering up of the male body and identity for consumer culture, is on the one hand liberating, yet also a cause for concern. While women have long been objectified as a means to fuel commercial desire, now it appears men are subjected to the same unflinching, and unattainable vision. Yet the implications of imposing such unattainable ideals upon masculinity are apparently a new subject for consideration, the implications of which still as of yet unknown.

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