An exhibition by Taryn Simon titled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar opened recently at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. This body of work spans four years of photographs addressing public access to American private and restricted locations. The images include many current cultural references including governmental and religious spaces, depicting the supposedly open yet concealed duality of American culture. Simon’s photos incorporate informative text that explains the subject and context to the viewer.

Her photos consistently depict the parts of American culture that remain out of view. Her previous body of work, the Innocents, documents the many cases of wrong conviction in the United States. These elaborately lit and staged portraits are filled with blank looks. In some cases, the former prisoners were shown with the people they were accused of victimizing. In interviews that accompanied the exhibition, the prisoners often questioned notions of justice and freedom. These photographs were shown internationally at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and the Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. Taryn Simon graduated from Brown University and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent shows have included exhibitions with the Whitney Museum and the Museum fur Modern Kunst, Frankfurt in 2007. Simon was also selected for the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2007 for this recent body of work.

In 1986, 7 million people created a human chain as part of the Hands Across America campaign to raise money to fight homelessness and hunger. New York artist Matt Keegan wanted to respond to that event and, last spring, he took a road trip from New York to New Mexico, making sculptural casts of the hands of mayors and people he met along the way. His current solo exhibition at Anna Helwing Gallery, titled Now’s the Time, includes those cast hands and explores the general correlations between what was going on in 1986 and the contemporary climate. Now’s the Time opened in Los Angeles’ Culver City on September 6th.

Keegan and Anna Helwing Gallery have also organized a series of events, including lectures and performances, to accompany the exhibition. Visit Anna Helwing Gallery online to get a full list of events and times.

Currently on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina are two new installations by artists Jarod Charzewski and Loul Samater.

Occupying nearly the entire second floor of the gallery space is Scarp, an installation by Jarod Charzewski comprised of what appears to be thousands of neatly folded items of clothing. The carefully organized mass of clothing replicates a geological formation with exposed strata and reveals a synthetic and fabricated history. Charzewski received his MFA in Sculpture from the University of Minnesota and has since exhibited internationally with shows at Ace Art Inc. in Winnipeg, Canada and Trisolini Gallery in Athens, Ohio.

On the main floor of the gallery Loul Samater has created Diving Dunce, an environment that seems to reference a party with a mass of glitter and tinsel enclosed in an entirely pink room. The series of painterly sculptures which occupy the gallery are mysterious and seem to exist in early stages of decay. The viewer is left to question if they have suddenly become a participant or has the celebration already ended. Samater received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection opened last week at the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, California. The exhibition includes 141 works by ninety-six different artists owned Mr. Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and art enthusiast, who holds one of the largest collections of contemporary Chinese artwork in the world. Mahjong demonstrates a span of Chinese history through the varied artworks (ranging in medium, subject matter, and aesthetic). The museum becomes a vessel for thematically separating ideas among the works, with six individual galleries, each dedicated to a different theme and subject. The exhibition is distinctive from other contemporary Chinese art exhibitions in that while includes works from the most popular Chinese artists of today, it also follows a history of artwork dating back to the 1970s (when China was in the midst of the Maoist Cultural Revolution).

The exhibition also includes film screenings of Chinese filmmakers (and artists), Ning Ying and Jia Zhangke. Mahjong will be on display at UC Berkeley’s museum until January.

After first being introduced to the artists dealing with the decades long conflict in Lebanon after seeing Walid Raad‘s Let’s be Honest, the Weather Helped at MoMA’s Color Chart exhibition earlier this year, I quickly learned that John Jurayj is among the other prominent artists involved in this global discussion. In his second solo show at Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, entitled Untitled (We Could Be Heroes), which opened September 6th and runs through October 25th, John Jurayj continues his dialog of discontent regarding the violent civil war through new works in nontraditional media. Jurayj exposes the “power players” in the Lebanese Civil War through Untitled (15 Men), his series of portraits of top-tier cohorts, including then PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. The unconventional portraits are made from gunpowder screened onto mirrored stainless steel, and scaled to the size of an official embassy portrait. The eyes of the portraits are left blank, revealing the mirrored surface underneath and creating the eerie sensation of looking at oneself while looking at each piece. Across the main gallery from the portraits are a series of paintings made on colored mirrored plexiglass, which seem to be color abstractions at first, but reveal imagery of attacks, explosions and the ruins of real estate caught in the battles.¬†

John Jurayj lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his MFA at Bard College in New York in 2005. He is currently in the “New Acquisitions” show at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum of Art in D.C.¬†He had a solo show at Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York City in the fall of 2007.¬†Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at the Alberto Peola Gallery in Turin, Italy, opening November 2008 and a group show at Hafriyat Karakoy in Istanbul, Turkey, opening October of 2008.

Australian artist Sally Smart is known for her large-scale collage installations applied directly to the gallery wall. She works with a range of media, including painted felt cut-outs, painted canvas, photographic elements, and printed fabric. The pins and joins that connect her work remain exposed to the viewer, emphasizing the performative process Smart undergoes in the collection, cutting, drawing, assembly, and installation of her work. The complexity and detail of each formal element engage the viewer in a search for recognizable elements and meaning.

Postmasters in New York is currently showing three of Smart’s collage cut-out works in Decoy Nest, also the title of the show’s centerpiece. Decoy Nest, seen above, occupies the main gallery wall, sprawling from floor to ceiling at a monumental 15×33 feet. The decoy nest is a strategy that birds use to deflect attention from their eggs. Smart says thinking about this idea led her to “draw connections to [her] art practice, in the strategies [she] used in conveying and creating meaning.” Decoy Nest is accompanied by two other collage cut-outs, Twilight Tree and Phantom (limb) Tree.

Smart currently lives and works in Melbourne. She received her M.F.A. from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne and has exhibited widely in Australia and around the world. Decoy Nest will remain at Postmasters until October 11, 2008.

Apocrypha is the title of a new exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Sean Higgins. The exhibition, which opened Saturday evening at OKOK Gallery in Seattle, features fourteen new digitally manipulated prints, all of which have been appropriated from the NASA image archives. Higgins continues the ambiguity found in his previous series of work, but now hones in on the inherent mystery of certain NASA images, further pushing the nature of perceived truth as he meticulously manipulates images of vast clouds, shuttle launches, and space equipment. The result is an entirely new fiction, one that contains infinite narrative possibilities for the viewer.

Sean Higgins received his MFA from The University of Pennsylvania and since the late nineties has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions including shows with Sixspace and Rogue Wave ’05 at the LA Louver Gallery, both in Los Angeles, California.