Art

Charlotte Becket

Through Feb. 5

Charlotte Becket's art is garbage, which pours perpetually onto the gallery floor. Crinkling and crackling, the sounds of beer cans, egg cartons, paper and foil fill the room, as the trash is funneled endlessly through The Wishing Well, Becket's mechanical, room-sized plywood and garbage construction.

Fixing the Cowlick, Better View and Getting Out, the three additional pieces on display, are small sculpted mounds of tightly folded white paper, which house tiny, robotic armatures that endlessly shuffle paper back and forth.

Becket's trash and endless toil use visual humor to explore frustration, futility and the biological reality: Life creates waste.

Taxter & Spengemann, 504 W. 22nd St., 1st Fl. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-924-0212; Tues.-Sat., 11-6, free.

-Julia Morton

Justin Faunce "Thanks for All the Memories"

Jan. 25-Mar. 5

A young painter who's never had a solo show sells for $12,000? That was Justin Faunce at last year's Armory Show. Of course, it helps when you're given prominent display in Leo Koenig's booth. Ironically, that's just the sort of hype-type branding Faunce's colorful acrylic collages indict. Golden arches and roaring lions are juxtaposed against fighter jets and gun barrels to create an alluring inventory of our country's biggest exports. It's not subtle, but then again, neither is Madison Avenue.

Leo Koenig Inc., 249 Centre St. (betw. Broome & Grand Sts.), 212-334-9255; Mon.-Sat., 10-6; free.

-Sean Manning

The Degenerate Magazine Show | Jan. 8?30

Down under the Williamsburg Bridge, this Yellow Brook Road is worth traveling. This month, the hole-in-the-wall gallery sports a collection of homespun collages from 27 local artists, styles ranging from altered magazine covers to digitally created publications.

Winner of the most popular backdrop goes to Cosmopolitan magazine; the traditional cutout-style collage by P5 builds upon the tasteless sex-oriented headlines that dominate this international glossy. Sunny Chapman also explores America's celebrity obsession through the Warhol-influenced piece in which the same image of Gwen Stefani is presented in multiple photocopies, each colored with different fluorescent markers.

Sex reigns at this show. On the opposite wall, the artists' disgust with society is apparent through Kim Monjoy's True Blue, an oversized compilation of lad mag covers, where a few random ideas, including online poker and internet hookups, are thrown in the mix amid the smutty pics and promises of more scantily clad babes inside the pages of Razor and Maxim. True Blue is sandwiched by Emma-Louise's Dollhaus Proprietress, a bizarre collage that reads "Plastination USA," and the racy Mofucka Comic. Frank Russo's fabricated magazine shows a caricature of a thug-like character smoking a joint, with a forty by his side labeled "coitus," and a swastika-emblazoned shirt. The fading words in the background read "Red Hook," telling the tale of local angst over a once avoided ghetto and its future as commercialized waterfront property. Mofucka's tagline aptly recites one of Marvin Gaye's famed lyrics, "Mercy mercy me, things ain't what they used to be."

Sadly, those words of wisdom ring true with Mike Bowman's Time for the Future, a mockery of Time magazine's decision to make President Bush Man of the Year. Part one of Bowman's collage features a human face with monkey and barbarian-like horns in place of the third eye; part two is a lion-human face with triangles over the eyes reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty's crown.

The most provocative image is Terrance Lindall's Williamsburg. A detailed painting of Broadway, the image imparts the often unspoken truth that some Brooklynites possess the same neighborhood-centric attitude as Manhattanites. The rat-infested street scene features the Dollhaus and the local arts association, renamed Williamsburg Historical Art Convent Klan. There's nothing accidental about the words and images chosen here-among the rats and run-down buildings, immigrants read ESL books and pray, and an artsy youngster sports an armband, a moustache and a tee with a swastika-like image. But his final touch is the most memorable scene: a tank on the Willamsburg Bridge and a sign bearing the following warning, "Oi Vey, You're Leaving Brooklyn. Once you cross the bridge, you're no longer in Kansas."

Yellow Brook Road, 37 B'way (betw. Wythe Ave. & Dunham Pl.), Brooklyn,718-486-0330; Sat. & Sun., 12-6; free.

-Andrea Toochin

Chapel of Sacred MirrorsThe painting looks strangely familiar. You're gazing at your own reflection skinless, smiling-surrounded by blinding white light. Crackling lines of neon energy radiate from seven glowing orbs along the length of your spine. There is no museum plaque to guide you in interpretation, only arcane text (Tibetan?) floating in the space around you like inter-dimensional graffiti. There is the scent of sandalwood; you close your eyes and breathe.

Thirty years in the making, Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) began with just a few loose sketches, evolving slowly and with painstaking labor into a series of 21 life-sized, elaborately framed oil paintings of the human body. Literally meant to reflect, CoSM guides the viewer in progression from the levels of their physical frame (skeleton, nervous system) to the subtle energy fields that permeate and surround it, each painted in impossibly vibrant colors and revealing a quality of light that is rarely seen in contemporary art.

The predominant feeling upon first seeing a work of Grey's, to borrow an expression, is something like "shock and awe." There is nothing quite like these paintings anywhere else in the world-the combination of technical skill (he studied cadavers for five years at Harvard Medical School and creates works of intricate anatomical preciseness) and mystical vision can be disarming. His work has been aptly described as "psychedelic realism," with heavy emphasis on both terms: Most of the paintings on display are directly inspired by Grey's own experiences and visions while "under the influence".

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, 540 W. 27th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 212-564-4253; Tues.-Sat., 11-6, $5.

-Simon Cohn

Betsy Kaufman | Through Sat., Feb. 19

Surprising is the word that best describes the new exhibition of drawings and paintings by Betsy Kaufman. Surprising because at first glance, you think you know what she's done-call it post-minimalism, or hard-edge abstraction. You turn to leave, but something stops you; it grabs your attention, asking for one more look. And looking again, you see it.

The "it" is Kaufman's passionate artistry at work alongside her aggressive geometry. Hidden at a distance, subtle undulating shapes compel you to move into an imitate range. And there, standing inches from her canvases, you notice Kaufman's skillful use of layered paint, colorful washes and rhythmic shapes.

Sunday, a large vertical canvas measuring 75 by 60 inches, features six silver horizontal stripes, reminiscent of minimalist Donald Judd's shelf-like sculptures. They hang in a calming haze of white washing over a pale yellow, with a fine white line zigzagging between the rigid bars. The reflecting light and careful composition makes the silver paint appear to float away.

Still No Hero Here is the same size and has many of the same elements, but the composition is very different. Wide, uneven, wave-like strokes of white, purple and violet wash over a series of horizontal rectangles that appear and fade depending on the density of over-layer. And here, the thin white line traces evenly from side to side across the entire canvas.

In addition to Kaufman's paintings, there are several fine, line drawings-some framed, and some drawn directly on the gallery walls. Using colored pencils to create a textile-like weave of intersecting lines, she rips and wraps them into textured illusions.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Kaufman has lived and exhibited in New York since the early 1980s. In this show, she continues to bend the rulers of minimalist abstraction. While methodical theory is the usual focus of nonrepresentational art, Kaufman's smoky colors, sensual pulse, and suggestive titles inspire narrative interpretations.

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 535 W. 22nd St. (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.), 212-255-8450, Tues.-Sat., 10-6, free.

-Julia Morton

Wandering: The Fourth Biannual Makor Marathon | Sun., Jan. 23

Twenty-three artists at the 92 Street Y's Makor Center show pieces from the six-month-long workshop where they were challenged to visually document past experiences. Exhibiting artists include singer Vanya Green, playwright Brian Pracht, sculptor Mimi Weinberg, filmmaker and choreographer Julia Tell Rivlin, photographer Julie Blattberg and performer Joan Fishman, among others, but a few visual artists stand out.

Shay Kun's series Teeth is a surrealist representation of his struggle to decipher escapism and fantasy. Here he shows the union of consumption and decay and their marriage over time, as a bright, shiny image turns dark, dismal and overpowering.

Manju Shandler embraces her training in theatrical design as a method of improving her storytelling skills, which despite work on the puppets from The Lion King, are honed for the purpose of visually analyzing the media. Shandler's wide range of work straddles Broadway, costume design, and visual arts; on the anniversary of 9/11, she was honored with a window at Bergdorf Goodman for Gesture, her series consisting of 2752 paintings, one for each life lost in the terrorist attacks. Her newest collection, a set of mixed media sculptures, represents human rights issues including genocide in Sudan, web-organized mass suicides in Japan and the post-9/11 loss of civil liberties in the U.S.

Wandering is more than a notion to Deborah Wasserman-it's a way of life. Born in Brazil and raised in Israel, the Brooklyn resident has progressed past her Frida phase to develop her own style. Passages is a compilation-style installation where paintings are based on frozen video frames, a method used to conquer space and time. The collection deals with the complexities of dream state versus reality. Here, in a manner similar to concepts behind Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, memory and time travel coalesce. Brian Sholis of Artforum, Sean Rocha of Slate and Dominique Nahas of Art in America will moderate a series of talks. Makor, 35 W. 67th St. (betw. Central Park W. & Columbus Ave.), 212-601-1000; 12-6, $20 includes knishes, pickles and $1 Rheingold beers. -Andrea Toochin