Opening this past weekend at the Deitch Projects 76 Grand Street gallery is the exhibition “Pictures Last Longer,” featuring new paintings by artist Micah Ganske in his first solo exhibition in NYC. The ambiguous imagery employed by the artist has been stated as optimistically pessimistic, cynically sincere, or epically banal. Ganske investigates our complex world by seductively revealing the potential for the horrible. The artist has developed a technique for paint application that uses staining to eliminate surface texture, resulting in a physical painting that resembles an ink-jet print. This time consuming process takes more than four or five months to complete for larger works. Ganske received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2005. The artist was included in “The Garden Party” at Deitch Projects in 2006 and received the Adobe Design Achievement Award from the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.

“The Searchers” is a series of photography conducted by the collaborative duo Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher which investigates Western spiritual tourism in India. The project, which is currently on view at the Noorderlicht Photofestival 2007 in The Netherlands, developed from a year-long trip that the artists took throughout ashrams, retreat centers and pilgrimage destinations of India. What was discovered through that religious landscape was varied and was stated by the artists as “a more nuanced relationship than we expected between India and the Westerners.” Other related projects for Bezzubov include “Things Fall Apart,” a photographic series that illustrates the aftermath of natural disasters in India, California, the Midwest, Florida, and Indonesia and Thailand, and “The Gringo Project,” which is a series of portraits of Western travelers in third world countries. “Things Fall Apart” has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, and has been exhibited in the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg, NYC, and with Taylor De Cordoba in Los Angeles.

Bezzubov received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and her undergraduate degree from the State University of New York, Purchase. The artist has received two Fulbright Scholarship Awards, one from travel to Cambodia (2000-01) and one for travel to India (2005-06).

Parisian artist Prune Nourry‘s work investigates elements of many current social and scientific issues such as genetic modification, stem cell research, fetishes and the commodification of the human form. The artist conducted a project of celebrity led fetishes with dogs and other pets as well as pet-baby substitution piece. For her latest work “Adoption Day,” the artist will conduct a performance piece scheduled for today in Regents Park / Central London presented by Jaguar Shoes. For this performance the artist has created five figurative silicone sculptures that are designed to be a hypothetical genetic hybrid baby. These sculptures will each be accompanied by a nanny and will travel from different parts of London, the performance will end with a series of family photo sessions including the newly created family addition.

Opening at P.P.O.W. in late October, Judy Fox will be showing “Snow White and the Seven Sins”. Playing on the classic Disney storyline Fox uses Pride, Envy, Anger, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust as surreal objects to surround a beautiful nude adolescent girl who is seemingly unconscious. Known for her sculptures of children rendered with refinement; exploration of the child’s body in life-size naturalistically-painted clay, the artist explores contemporary sociological issues by creating vulnerable, naked and exposed individuals. Fox received her Masters from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and has received two NEA grants, and an award from the “Anonymous Was a Woman” foundation. She is a fellow of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and is a 2006 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The P.P.O.W gallery in NYC and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris both currently represent Fox.

Using materials such as beet juice, crushed blackberries, fabric dye, bleach, and oil paint on unprimed canvas, Patrick Hill creates ephemeral-seeming paintings and sculptures in his first New York solo show, “Forming” at Bortolami-Dayan in Chelsea. Hill sets up a range of juxtapositions in his works–the organic and synthetic, traditional and non-traditional, decaying and enduring, to create an oddly harmonious and symbiotic environment in which these materials intersect and rely on each other. As Hill explains, his work is about “personal as well as universal human concerns of life and death, fate and chance, tension and balance‚Ķand out of degeneration and rebirth come the materialization of form.” Hill especially plays with the notions of permanence and impermanence in this exhibition. An unpredictable and whimsical mobile brings together components such as glass, concrete, steel and fabric, taking cues in structure and materiality from artists like Alexander Calder, Lee Bontecou, and Richard Serra. The use of unprimed canvas calls to mind the work of Helen Frankenthaller and Robert Morris, and Hill’s process of layering fabric and allowing substances to soak into the canvas allows for the ability to see both the evidence of residue and the active process of decay.

Patrick Hill was born in Michigan and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo exhibitions with David Kordansky in LA, the Reliance in London and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. Group exhibitions include: Ishtar, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis and the upcoming show “Imagine Los Angeles,” Spruth Magers Munich Projekte, Munich, Germany.

“the return of the real” is a new exhibition opening this week at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London that will feature the outcome of artist Phil Collins’ Tate Tuner Prize nominated work that features true stories of television betrayal. The artist investigates the post-documentary culture that has become known as reality TV, and the surrounding issues of authenticity and illusion, intimacy and inaccuracy, expectation and betrayal. For the past four years Collins has been engaging with the media through reality TV formats, taking testimonials from former show participants and industry professionals that reveal televisions exploitations. Through this process the artist is able to introduce performance and conceptually grounded approaches to video and photography through popular culture and low-budget production. The artist received his undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester and his graduate degree from the University of Ulster, Belfast, and now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

In an upcoming exhibition opening this Thursday at the James Harris Gallery in Seattle, artist Katrina Moorhead will exhibit the work “on or about December 1981,” a set of DeLorean car doors exquisitely crafted out of plywood. Moorhead explores ideas related to beauty, temporality, failure, and optimism, and through these doors is able to elevate the controversial car and production factory in Belfast to highlight its short life. In addition, the artist will also exhibit a series of drawings that also convey a sense of somberness. Born in Northern Ireland in 1971, Moorehead represented her country in the last Venice Biennale. In 2005 she received the International Artists in Residence Award at the Artpace Foundation in San Antonio, TX; she now lives and works in Houston, TX. The artist received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland in 1996, and has completed solo exhibitions at the Inman Gallery (2006) and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (2002).