Jesse Bercowetz has a huge mobile on display at The Happy Lion in Chinatown. His solo exhibition, which is the New York artist’s first on the West Coast runs until October 11th, flaunts several works, but the luminary piece– and the real reason for going– is the behemoth, nearly room-sized installation entitled The Pale Memory of Man. The roomy gallery space, usually noted for its high ceilings and the natural light that bounces off the white walls, is shown no mercy by The Pale Memory of Man. The over sized mixed media mobile looks like something that Tim Burton would create for one of his sets, and the ramshackle construction rivals that of a child’s fort. However, once the casual onlooker absorbs the grandiose scale of the piece, a more engrossed observation will reveal the many intriguing idiosyncrasies of this mysterious black contraption of scavenged wood, polystyrene, plaster, glass, electric fans, foam core, paint, and capriciously hanging photos and notes. For one thing, the shape of this particular mobile is less hanging-above-a-baby’s-bed and more springing violently from the framework of an oil derrick. Aside from the obvious, and timely, conversation about oil and energy consumption, the interesting juxtaposition for me is the implied permanence that the oil derrick represents in general, as compared with the seemingly intentional shoddiness of the construction of the piece.

Jesse Bercowetz is a graduate of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded a Jerome Fellowship and is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Selected exhibitions include: The Brooklyn Museum, NY, The Drawing Center, NY, White Columns, NY, PS1 / MoMA, NY, Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin and Derek Eller Gallery, NY. This month he will present a new large-scale sculpture in the exhibition Next Wave At The Brooklyn Academy of Music, curated by Dan Cameron. There will be an installation of his collaborative work at Mass MoCA in 2009. Bercowetz lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Vivid, Tofer Chin‘s current exhibition at Commissary Arts in Los Angeles, doesn’t look like it’s about sex, even though the works’ titles and the press release explicitly reference gender, sexuality and adolescent ambivalence. Yet maybe the best thing about Chin’s work is that it asks us to reassess the way we associate psychological and bodily phenomena with graphics.

Chin’s paintings occupy the place where decorative and minimal meet hipster, where grids and lines start to become fun instead of austere. The fetish-finish majesty of Confirmation, the largest painting in the small gallery, seems a warped redress of color field painting, its big blue rays shooting up past the skewed checkered background into a pastel-colored halo. Yet putting Chin’s work into an art historical narrative seems somehow wrong. Ultimately, he’s more interested in the here and now.

Chin starts his work at the computer, experimenting with perspective and color. When he translates his digital manipulations into paint, the interaction between his sleekly composed images and the tactile nature of paint emphasizes that strange disconnect between systematics and visceral, bodily sensations. Chin, who graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002, has recently exhibited at Fecal Face Dot Gallery in San Francisco, Ad Hoc Art in Brooklyn, and Rojo Artspace in Barcelona. Vivid continues through October 25th.

A major mid-career survey of renown photographer Catherine Opie opens this week at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Catherine Opie: American Photographer opens Friday September 26th and runs through January 7, 2009. The exhibition will showcase over 200 of Opie’s iconic images from the past decades. Opie’s “Portraits” clinched her a place on the map of art history, depicting bold statements of identity for a marginalized and often villanized subculture during the 1990s within the visual context of a formal studio portrait. Most notably, her piece, Dyke (1993) brought the discussion of lesbianism, within not only the paradigm of feminist art, but that of “mainstream” cultural relevance, to the forefront. Dyke depicts the naked, freckled back of a shaved-headed woman facing a rich velvet backdrop of purple damask. The word DYKE is tattooed in thick black Old English font across the back of her neck. There have been many interpretations of this piece, dealing with the very term “Dyke” and whether it is in fact a disparaging label to attach to someone or a pronouncement of pride from that same person.

Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is also a professor of fine art at UCLA. Opie’s work has been featured in acclaimed exhibitions in the United States and Europe. She has had solo exhibitions at, and which traveled to, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Orange County Museum of Art in California, The Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Saint Louis Art Museum, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as well as at Regan Projects in Los Angeles and Gladstone Gallery in New York.

AIKO opened a solo exhibition of recent works at Brooklynite Gallery on September 13th with live music by Soul Sonic Force. The exhibition, entitled Shut Up & Look, will remain at the gallery until October 11, 2008. AIKO combines a mastery of stenciling with brushwork and spray paint to emulate the urban decay of her street works. She creates city sirens, whose seductive glances and poses captivate the viewer, exploring female identity and sexuality. AIKO recently departed from the artist collective Faile, where she was a founding member.

AIKO moderated Brooklyn Museum‘s Visual Release: Gender, Art, Representation and Exchange as part of the museum’s Love and Pop symposium and was a guest speaker at Envisioning Japan: Creative Dialogues with the Wider World during the Murakami symposium. She has also exhibited with Lady Pink in PINK/AIKO: Brick Ladies of NYC.

73 Funshine, an exhibition by Bay Area-artist Jason Jagel, is currently exhibiting at Electric Works gallery in San Francisco. Electric Works functions as a gallery space as well as a high-tech and traditional print workshop.

In addition to the exhibition, 73 Funshine serves as a launch for Jagel’s new monograph book (also titled 73 Funshine), which features over 200 colored pages of work dating back to 1997, most of which is musically oriented. Music is a strong driving force behind Jagel’s artwork. The book and exhibition include Jagel’s colorful palette and multifaceted paper canvases which demonstrate his “fictional autobiography”. His use of gauche, pen, ink, and pencil creates a diaspora of dimension-optical diversions which exist side by side one another, and the viewer is invited into the delightfully dizzy scenes of Jagel’s conception. Cityscapes, people (generally himself or those close to him), nature, and text are common images found in Jagel’s work, themes which he states are narrating his fictitious life story. His aesthetic shows Guston-esque influence with overtly exaggerated brush strokes, the use of hands and smoke. In addition to painting and drawing, Jagel creates paper sculptures and site-specific installations. He has also produced album covers for such notable musicians as Madlib and MF Doom.

Jagel currently lives and works in San Francisco and has shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe. He is simultaneously showing at Los Angeles’ Richard Heller Gallery. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts and his MFA from Stanford University.

On September 13th, Julia Fullerton-Batten opened her first American solo show titled In Between at the Randall Scott Gallery in Washington, D.C. This London based photographer has been gaining recognition over the past two years for her photographic series, which depict the struggle of adolescence. Julia Fullerton-Batten uses intense set design and photographs girls who are not professional models to enhance the uncomfortable and awkward teenage experience. In her previous body of work, Teenage Stories, the artist focuses on images of young girls in a miniature world. Her work addresses the emotional transition of young girls, focusing on the duality of childhood fantasy and the responsibility of adult life. Fullerton-Batten creates intense images representative of the emotional physical changes of teenage girls, portraying loneliness and awkwardness combined with playfulness and whimsy.

Fullerton-Batten was born in Germany, graduated from the Berkshire College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in London. She has recently shown with the Shanghi Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gallery Caprice Horn in Berlin, the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the National Portrait Gallery in London. See more of her work in recent issues of Juxtapoz Magazine.

On view now at Fette’s Gallery in Culver City, California is new work by Switzerland-born artist Sandrine Pelletier in her first Los Angles solo exhibition, titled Insekts. The work featured is a continuation of the artist’s investigation into universal childhood experiences, it’s associated artifacts and memories, and the fables that are told to children in this pivotal learning period. The exhibition highlights these ideas through embroideries, sculptures, and lace cut-outs.

The artist currently lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland and Paris, France. She is a graduate of Ecole D’Arts Appliques and the University of Art and Design in Switzerland. Since, she has exhibited with the Levy Gallery in Brussels, Tsumori Chisato in Paris and Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, Switzerland, among other international galleries.