Galerie Adler in New York will present new drawings, animations and an installation in “Paradox Parade,” opening this Friday, featuring Icelandic artist Sigga Bjorg Sigurdardottir. The artist produces several anthropomorphic creatures existing in stark white environments that seem to walk the line between playful and grotesque. The illustrated creatures have a strange humanistic quality, often becoming menacing while simultaneously offering comic relief in their awkward and laughable stance. When describing her work the artist has stated, “My work is about what happens when someone does something to somebody or something happens to someone but sometimes someone is simply doing something or thinking something else.” Sigurdardottir was born in Reykjavik, Iceland and currently lives and works Reykjavik and Glasgow, Scotland. The artist is an MFA graduate of The Glasgow School of Art and received her BFA from The Icelandic Academy of Art and Design. Sigurdardottir has already began an international career with exhibitions “Wrong House,” with Washington Garcia Gallery in Glasgow, “Paracide Park,” with Centre d’art et de diffusion Clark in Montreal, Canada, and a forth coming exhibition at Kunstverein Uelzen in Uelzen, Germany. The artist has been featured in LIST Icelandic Art News and received an artist award from The Woollen Glove, from The Icelandic Art Academy in 2006.

The paintings of Julie Heffernan are a constant dilemma of opposites between the gorgeous and the grotesque, attraction and repulsion, with a bounty of enormous amounts of wealth and waste of resources, energy and lives. Each one of Heffernan’s figures are heavily draped with the carcasses of animals, strung with rose-webbing, bejeweled with medals and encircled by heads of state. As the artist’s frantic imagery heightens to a climax, each woman gazes at the viewer with serene calm. Heffernan received her undergraduate degree in painting and printmaking from University of California and her graduate degree in painting from Yale University. She has received a Lila Acheson Wallace award, NY Foundation for the Arts award, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright-Hayes Grant. Heffernan will be showing at P.P.O.W. Sept. 20-Oct. 20 in New York City.

Coming Sept. 5 at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York are the photographs of Chris Gentile. Presented as allegories of his studio practice, the artist constructs lightning bolts, surfboards and lifeguard chairs that are meticulously cast in small scale and mixed with a variety of functional studio objects, such as plywood, saw horses and a trashcan. The combination of the important being symbolic and the mundane being obvious is one that allows Gentile to explore the themes of hope and abandonment. The process is co-dependent in that even while these are photographs of sculptures, they are equally shaped by the fact that their sole representation and exhibition will be through photographs rather than a viewer’s firsthand experience of the tangible object. The artist received his BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design and his MFA from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The artist has shown work at the Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco and the Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Va.

Australian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Rachel Khedoori is currently presenting a group of new sculptures with Hauser & Wirth in Zurich that continues the artist’s examination of physical and metal space. Khedoori is able to achieve complex environments through the interlacing of architecture, sculpture and film. The combination of these elements allows the artist to experiment with physical and remembered space, provoking both subtly disturbing and calming sensations. For her recent exhibition, she returned to the materials of foam, plaster, wood and wax, contrasting from earlier works through the use of the model rather than a physical walk-though space. The artist first made a name for herself in a New York debut exhibition at David Zwirner with her twin sister and now acclaimed artist Toba Khedoori. Since that exhibition, Rachel Khedoori has gone on to present several international exhibitions, including works with Villa Arson in Nice, France (2004), and a self-titled exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (2001). Khedoori completed her BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (1988) and her MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles (1994).

Opening next week at the Richard Goodall Gallery in Manchester, U.K., is “ipso facto,” the digital prints of artist Ray Caesar. The show will correspond with the artist’s first printed publication of collected works titled “Art Volume One.” Caesar now lives and works in Toronto, though he was born in the U.K. Before becoming a visual artist, he worked as an architect and then as a special-effects artist for TV and film. All of the artist’s works are produced digitally from conception to print and often contain figurative and characteristically surreal elements. Caesar has exhibited internationally with recent exhibitions “Hidden Doors and Secret Rooms” with Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City and with The Londsdale Gallery in Toronto. The artist has also been featured in the publications Glamour Italia (March 2005) and Juxtapoz Magazine (July/Aug. 2004).

The dreamlike, psychological investigation that is characteristic of artist Jeremy Blake‘s work has developed since his short film “Reading Ossie Clark” in 2003. Blake is well known for his DVDs, C-prints, paintings and drawings, all of which present visual narratives that are broken by psychedelic and hallucinogenic imagery. In 2002, the artist was invited by director Paul Thomas Anderson to create a digital series of abstracted sequences for the film Punch-Drunk Love, featuring Adam Sandler. Blake will be featured in the new issue T of art and design magazine Beautiful Decay, which is available now. Regretfully, before that issue’s release, the art world lost Jeremy Blake and his romantic partner, filmmaker, critic and video game artist Theresa Duncan in a tragic series of events. Blake, a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, was selected three times in a row for the Whitney Biennial (’00, ’02, ’04). His “Winchester” video series was presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). Other works have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC and the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos Museum of Contemporary Art in Spain.

“Days of Being Wild,” a three-person exhibition featuring artists Andy Kehoe, Kathleen Lolley and Evan B.Harris, opened yesterday at The Lab 101 Gallery in Los Angeles. Each artist brings a distinct yet cohesive aesthetic to the show, using elements of illustrative mysticism, fantasy and storybook narratives in darkly sparse landscapes. Kehoe, who lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a graduate of Parsons School of Design and is currently represented by Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City. Lolley received her BFA from Calarts in experimental animation. She has worked on commercial animations such as Sponge Bob Squarepants and has been included in Elle Magazine and Japanese Vogue. Harris is a self-taught artist brought up in Medford, Oregon. Harris’ work is largely inspired from fables, folklore and his own imagination. While each of these artists have diverse backgrounds and experiences, this show cleverly unites ideas and applications that are often saturated with American mythology, storytelling and humanistic illustration.