Currently on view at the Nathan Larramendy Gallery is the solo exhibition Pedestal featuring new paintings and sculpture by artist Amir H. Fallah. Continuing the use of imagery such as terrariums, botanicals and Persian miniature painting, Fallah’s work explores his experience of adolescent development when his interests were being formed and new paths were constantly discovered. Fallah has become known for his large scale fort structures, which are built intuitively on site and can reach over 16 ft in both height and width. Fallah has exhibited these structures at the L.A.Louver Gallery in Los Angeles, RHYS Gallery in Boston, Art Dubai 2008, Dubai U.A.E., and has work scheduled to be exhibited at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC this fall.

Amir, who is a previous DailyServing interviewee, is also the founder and creative director of Beautiful/Decay Magazine, an international quarterly publication that is a synthesis of art, design, fashion, music and contemporary culture. Exhibiting simultaneously with Pedestal will be the photographic works of Fallah in the group exhibition After the Revolution: Contemporary Photography from Tehran and California on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission at City Hall until June 27th.

Fairytales, imagination and surrealism present themselves within Phantasia, a group exhibition currently showing at The Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington. While using photography as a preferred means of expression the artists are subverting the medium’s usual association with capturing the real. A range of interpretations relating to fantasy are presented, as Andrew Mamo draws inspiration from Nineteenth century science fiction, while Magdalena Bors incorporates mythical imagery into everyday scenarios. Simon Strong‘s sleek photography puts a modern spin on ancient fables, Alexia Sinclair presents the wonders of digital manipulation by reinterpreting medieval history and Mark Kimber reflects on childhood memories to create hybrid photos that appear almost as painted canvases.

Andrew Mamo’s original interest lied in film studies, which he practiced at Sydney University over twenty years ago. It is only in the last six years that his digital photography has been exhibited and received awards including the Maywa Denki Award at the 2003 Toray Digital Creation Awards, Japan and the 2002 Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award from Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. Magdalena Bors recently completed a bachelor of arts majoring in photography from RMIT University, Melbourne in 2006. She has participated in various group exhibitions on a national scale and was the 2007 winner of the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize.

Deitch Studios in Long Island City is currently showing assume vivid astro focus‘ Absolutely Venomous Accurately Fallacious (Naturally Delicious) until August 10th. avaf is a collaborative group of artists, designers, filmmakers, and performers that creates different projects based on each institution and space they visit. They have exhibited all over the world, including at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, and will be participating in the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial. The number of people working on each project varies, and the group always wears masks to encourage the viewers to focus on the work and not their personalities. The exhibition at Deitch is a combination of murals, collages, sculptures, video, and installation, as well as a special zone for experience and interaction (included in every avaf project).

In the center of the gallery space is an enormous gender-bending figure lying belly down across the floor. The massive trannie sculpture (with high heeled strappy shoes, a meandering phallic symbol, and two heads) loudly references change and is trapped beneath the facade of an old Brooklyn house. This architectural inclusion references the reconstruction (and destruction) that is taking place throughout the city and into Long Island. The walls are covered with a beautiful mix of printed wall papers and neon sculptures, which are juxtaposed with harsher materials such as raw plywood and cardboard.

avaf believes in a philosophy of viral contamination, which asserts that as contemporary cultural participants, we are bombarded with an incessant stream of information and imagery. This bombardment leads to the development of a new human species, one which is capable of digesting unbelievable amounts of information through various media. In avaf’s opinion, music is the medium that comes closest to perfection because of the way it reaches the listener. With no physical presence, music manifests itself in our bodies, giving us a somewhat abstract, but intensely sensorial and corporeal understanding of what we hear. Visually, avaf uses abstraction and figuration and a wealth of materials and information to construct an environment to envelop us. The fusion of elements, actions, and artists creates a synergy and abundance that consumes us, much the way music does.

A collection of works by acclaimed Chinese conceptual artist, Ai Weiwei is currently on show at Sherman galleries, Paddington. The display, entitled Under Construction focuses primarily on two artworks by the artist. The installation piece named Through fills the entire exhibition room and is comprised of fragments of tables and temple pillars that date back from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Weiwei has reconstructed them so that the angular beams often impale the tables and lean against them.

His second major work featured within the exhibition is a three hour film entitled Fairytale, which documents his performance piece of the same name, completed for Documenta XII in Kassel, Germany last year. For this work Weiwei invited a diverse range of 1001 Chinese citizens, stemming from different ages and provinces to come to Germany and view Documenta XII as part of his performance. He arranged their passports and accommodation and even gave them spending money, allowing them to create their own plans. In correspondence with this, the artist also organized the importation of 1001 chairs from the Qing and also Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to be situated around the city of Kassel throughout Documenta XII’s duration.

Weiwei studied at Beijing Film Academy and Parsons School of Design. After being born and raised in China he moved to the United States in his early 20s, where he lived for over a decade, before later returning to his homeland, where he currently lives and works. He helped design the National Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and was the co-curator of Fuck Off, a notorious exhibition showcasing shocking Chinese art that coincided with the Third Shanghai Biennale in 2000.

Kader Attia: New Work is French-Algerian artist Kader Attia’s largest US exhibition to date. The exhibition, on display at the Henry Art Museum in Seattle, features site-specific installations that are at once apocalyptic and unassuming. Attia’s aluminum foil ghosts exude a ritualistic, ominous serenity but they also have a low-tech, ephemeral quality. The same goes for Attia’s Rochers Carres: the tilted sheetrock and plywood boxes create a city-like environment that seems doomed to fall but that also seems to accept its fate without putting up a fight.

Attia, born to an Algerian family, grew up outside Paris and studied at the Ecole Superieure des Arts Appliques and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs. His work often probes issues related to community and cultural environments. At the 2005 Biennale de Lyon, Attia constructed children out of bird seed and placed them in a cage with live pigeons in order to explore the biennale’s theme: experiencing duration. Since then, Attia has shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Musee d’Art Contemporain of Lyon, as well as other international galleries and museums. Attia’s current exhibition at the Henry reflects a mature exploration of the ways in which structure and ritual affect contemporary life.

A museum retrospective for the late Allan Kaprow almost seems paradoxical. While Kaprow wasn’t an anti-establishment artist, he certainly functioned outside of institutional constraints. Nonetheless, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has taken on Kaprow‘s spontaneous aesthetic, hosting a flexible off-site exhibition that reinvents Kaprow’s Happenings of the 1970s and 1980s. Artists throughout Los Angeles are restaging Kaprow’s collaborative performances for this sporadic exhibition which began in March and continues through June 30th. The exhibition, titled Art as Life, attempts to maintain the loose character of Kaprow’s performances, re-envisioning rather than repeating specific Happenings.

Kaprow began trying to art more like life in 1950s, eventually coining the phrase”Happenings,” which loosely refers to barely orchestrated events in which people simply do something. Some of Kaprow’s performances were confrontational and political – like Don’t in 1970, a performance in which participants held signs that said “Do not enter” and blockaded a square of grass – while others were clearly about the way people live. In Time Pieces, originally performed in 1973 and reinvented by Art Center College, participants exchanged breath, kisses, or read each other’s pulses. Trading Dirt, originally a 1983 performance in which participants literally exchanged buckets of dirt, has been reinvented as a gossip blog. In the above video, volunteers, students, and artists recreate Kaprow’s Fluids, building ice block structures throughout Los Angeles and emphasizing the impermanence of urban spaces.

Vorstellung is Will Duty’s second solo exhibition at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York. The artist draws abstract graphite fields that recall planetary and other imageries, mesmerizing in their elegant and evocative simplicity. His illusory drawings represent vast cosmos and endless expanses, suggesting a real space beyond any known forms. The artist uses iterative mirrorings and other visual transformations, which combine with the meticulous and repetitive nature of the execution to create an unsettling undercurrent. This is enhanced by the palpable tension between the flatness of the picture plane and the seemingly endless continuation of the picture. In German, the term vorstellung refers to images formed by objects that are not perceivable to the senses.

Duty received a B.S from the University of Chicago and a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union, New York. He currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Duty has previously exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York and at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles. Vorstellung will be on display at Jeff Bailey Gallery until May 24, 2008.