Outside the entrance to “Fashion and Technology” at the Museum at FIT, Hussein Chalayan’s Spring 2007 runway show plays on a loop. Animated by elegant, invisible robotics, the clothes begin to metamorphose through decades of fashion history. A chaste Edwardian gown sheds its corsetry, revealing a beaded flapper dress. A curvaceous ’50s silhouette shrinks into a ’60s shift. Chalayan’s lyrical, shape-shifting collection serves as the exhibition’s epigraph as well as its teleological conclusion. Told exclusively through selections from the museum’s costume collection, “Fashion and Technology” (on view through May 8) charts technology’s influence on fashion from the Industrial Revolution to the present day.

Inside, a video loops Burberry’s 2011 holographic runway show with models bursting into thin air. Freedom of Creation’s 2005 3-D printed garment prototype sits in a glass case. After these expository frontispieces, you’re taken back to the Industrial Revolution. Spinning jennies, sewing machines, and synthetic dyes are shaking up the means of clothing production. A machine-knit men’s waistcoat from 1870 and a machine-stitched wedding costume are evidence of a nascent fashion industry. Cotton supplanted linin and wool as the fabric of our lives.

As one heliotrope taffeta day dress from 1860 can attest, the color purple — once reserved for monarchs and clergy — became available to the burgeoning bourgeoisie though the invention of aniline dyes. With the onset of Art Deco, we begin to see the deployment of technology as, not only a means, but an aesthetic. One jacket of avant-garde persuasion is decorated with zeppelins and skyscrapers. Newfangled substances like cellophane and Bakelite became the scintillating, confetti-like stuff of flapper dresses. Charles James and Elsa Schiaparelli married form and function by deploying the zipper as a decorative device. One forward-thinking (yet sadly anonymous) designer created an evening bag with an electric plug and socket as a clasp.

After the Spartan ethos of WWII, when fashion generally courted necessity rather than imagination (rayon became big during this era because it replicated the look of silk at a fraction of the cost), the space-age couture of Andre Courreges, Pierre Cardin, Emilio Pucci, and Yves Saint Laurent signaled a resurgence of formal experimentation. A trio of mini dresses from 1968 — a brown Courreges designed for recreational space travel, a hot pink Cardin made from three-dimensional embossed fabric, and a Harry Gordon photo print dress depicting a rocket launch — encapsulate the giddy excitement of the Space Race.

In the 1990s, fashion became infatuated with a new technological frontier. The celestial mystique of outer space became eclipsed by the vast cosmic Xanadu of cyberspace. Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Mad Max”-inspired spandex jumpsuit, with its biomorphic matrix of spots, is a pioneering example the now-ubiquitous digital print. Kenneth Richard’s iridescent vinyl mini skirt and belly shirt ensemble is the bottled essence of late-’90s cyber kitsch.

The exhibition brings you up to date with an outfit from Mandy Coon’s Spring 2013 collection. Inspired by the seismic motions of a MIDI audio file, the look is evocative of the much-ballyhooed New Aesthetic, an artistic zeitgeist based on the collision of the digital with the real. A reaction against retro-minded post-postmodern hipster culture, the New Aesthetic is a jamboree of pixilated, aggregative cyber-reality. Louise Gray’s 2012 dress, which lifts the pattern of a QR code as a graphic trope, fits neatly into the New Aesthetic’s vocabulary of 8-bit graphics, hash-tags, and animated GIFS. But, as critic Bruce Sterling has suggested, this vocabulary can be laden with spurious metaphysical claims and uncritical machine love.

The meandering trajectory of fashion has been paved by successes and failures. Some innovations have become time-tested conventions (see the zipper or the sewing machine), while others, such as the nylon wash-and-wear business suit, seem to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Though it was made in 1997, Simon Thorogood’s hooded gown is chillingly relevant. It’s evocative of a Jedi’s mantle and it was actually inspired by real-life “Star Wars” technology: the shape of pilotless aircraft drones. It is one of the few garments in the exhibition that gives pause to technology’s inevitable dark side. For all its intelligent curation and encyclopedic detail, “Fashion and Technology” misses an opportunity. The show’s tidy technological determinism doesn’t leave room for examination of the social, economic, environmental, and human consequences of mechanization, from cotton’s role in the 18th-century slave trade to the economic exploitation the drives fast fashion’s supply chains.

The future of fashion can simultaneously inspire curious wonder or Luddite horror. Clothes could be decked with LED lights, rigged with microscopic robots that monitor your heartbeat and check your Facebook. Garments could be printable from the comfort of your home. At the end of the exhibition, a screen displays backstage footage of Diane Von Furstenburg’s Spring 2013 show, recorded on Google glasses worn by the models and by DVF herself. The technology — a tiny computer that lives on your face — is creepy. The video’s content — mostly the backs of models heads — is boring. The glasses — a thin aluminum headband with nose pads — are ugly.

The Google/DVF collaboration cannot be further from the protean magic of Chalayan’s show. The two films bookend the possibilities of what partnership between technology and fashion might mean. It can remove the human hand from construction or lend a hand to skilled craftspeople, entrench neo-Brutalist design aesthetics or allow for formal experimentation, and produce cyborg-like disassociation or foster critical engagement 

To see images from the Museum at FIT’s “Fashion and Technology” exhibition, click on the slideshow. 

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Beginning in the late 1960s, artist-run venues like Artists Space in New York and A Space in Toronto began springing up in and around the U.S. thanks in part to a push from the National Endowment for the Arts to sponsor artists’ own organizations. These spaces functioned not only as incubators for legends — Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres among them — but also as a home for equally worthy artists who never reached that level of renown or commercial success.

Then, public funding began to shrink — first in the Reagan era, then in the aftermath of the culture wars of the 1990s, and most recently post-2008. Again and again, alternative spaces have had to develop alternative sources of revenue. The viability of these spaces has never seemed more important than today, a time when the art world is drowning in fairs, auctions, and fear that money is eclipsing the work that matters most. In an effort to shine a light on this bootstrapped, unglamorous, and often surprisingly uncynical part of the art world, we’re kicking off our new series. “Alternatives” will spotlight different alternative spaces around the country and explain what makes them work, with the hope that they might serve as case studies, adding to the conversation about what models of art might be sustainable or desirable in the present.

For our first installment, we’re focusing on one of America’s earliest alternative spaces: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, which was founded in 1974.

ORIGIN

Hallwalls was born in a converted ice packing warehouse in Essex, New York. A group of young artists at Buffalo State College — Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Charles Clough, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, and Michael Zwack— decided to transform the hallways between the artist studios there into a gallery — hence the name “Hallwalls.” 

The founders exhibited their own work at first, but before long, they were attracting artists from all corners of the country, including Lydia Benglis, Robert Mangold, and Vito Acconci. At the time, Sherman, Longo, and Bartolo all worked at the prominent outdoor exhibition space Artpark, and lured those visiting artists to Hallwalls to perform and give lectures. Such visits proved influential for the young founders: In a 1993 interview, Sherman said that “body art sort of clicked for me” after a visit from Acconci, whose work she had previously considered “disgusting.”

ALTERNATIVE HOW?

Hallwalls wasn’t simply alternative because of what it was not — a commercial gallery or museum. It also came to represent an alternative to regimented genres at a time when interdisciplinary programming was still in its infancy. “It was different from a museum of contemporary art because it was mixing art forms all the time,” executive director Ed Cardoni explained recently. “There have always always filmmakers, writers, musicians, and others in addition to visual artists, and everybody — from Longo to Clough — was collaborating on happenings and performances.”

“I remember Hallwalls as being very supportive,” artist Christian Marclay told ARTINFO in an e-mail. In 1985, the organization helped him produce his first EP, the notorious “Record Without a Cover,” which was, as the name suggests, sold without any protective packaging and left to deteriorate on its own.

The community wasn't always receptive to Hallwalls' avant-garde interests. In the late 1980s, the police threatened to shut down Buffalo's first gay and lesbian film festival, organized by the space, for allegedly displaying lewd material. A performance Marclay did there earned him his “worst-ever review” — the student newspaper called it a hoax. (“The review was so bad, it was funny,” he said.)

After early years that, according to many first-hand accounts, felt quite dominated by white men, Hallwalls made a conscious effort to expand its programming. It wanted to be diverse, said Cardoni, “but not just in a pure identity-based way. The formal experimentation was always super important.” In 1988, Fred Wilson brought together 10 non-Western artists, including Emily Cheng, Eugenio Espinosa, and Tyrone Mitchell, for an exhibition called “Double Vision.” The abstract artwork in the show wrestled with identity politics and cultural heritage in subtle ways at a time when “multiculturalism” was considered ham-fisted and out of fashion. More recently, a 2006 survey of Suzy Lake — a Canadian artist whose haunting photographs of herself in costumes were a profound influence on Cindy Sherman — is credited with relaunching her career in the United States.

MAKING IT WORK

Hallwalls is one of only a few non-profit alternative spaces born in the 1970s that survives today. How'd it manage? The answer isn’t very sexy: lean budgets and fundraising. In 1991, when public arts funding was on the rise, Hallwalls had a budget of $630,000, nearly 60 percent of which came from the New York State Council for the Arts and the NEA. Now, its income is considerably smaller — $502,888 in 2012 — and public sources account for 21 percent. The rest, according to Cardoni, comes from a combination of membership dues, individual donors, a benefit auction, and corporate business support.

Still, Hallwalls has gotten creative to maximize its public funding. (Twenty-one percent is nothing to sneeze at, after all.) In 1997, the NEA restricted organizations from applying for multiple grants and eliminated funding for individual artists. The new rules meant Hallwalls would have to decide where to funnel its money — music, visual art, or media studies, but not all three. Cardoni had the last laugh.

“I had the idea to create a residency program,” he explained. “Instead of applying for funding for one discipline, we applied for funding for the residency. Each curator was allowed to bring one artist, which meant we were able to continue to get NEA support that would help all of our programming areas. At the same time, by inviting artists to do these residencies that involved creating new works, we were supporting artists who had lost their ability to get funding individually.”

Since 1997, the NEA has granted Hallwalls $20,000 to $30,000 a year for its residency program. It still continues today.

To see images from Hallwalls's storied history, click on the slideshow.

Do you know of an alternative space in the United States that would be a good fit for our series? E-mail us at newseditors[at]artinfo.com with the word ALTERNATIVES in the subject line. 

“It’s ephemeral art in motion. You see something. You look at it. It lasts a few seconds, and you'll probably never see it again,” said Cirque de Soleil founder Guy Laliberté. The French Canadian billionaire, circus entrepreneur, fire-eater, and high-stakes poker player added “space photographer” and “amateur astronaut” to his colorful resume when he spent 11 days at the International Space Station in September 2009. Looking out a small window, he photographed our planet from over 30 miles above the Earth’s surface with a Nikon D3X camera. Forty photographs, published in a book entitled “Gaia,” are now on view in their large-format splendor at Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan. Miles above the earth, vast terrains become marvelous abstractions. Western Mongolia looks strangely fleshy and biomorphic, like a cell seen under a microscope. The Sahara desert resembles the surface of Mars. Cynics might write them off as the vanity project of a high-flying billionaire space tourist, but the photographers are a sight to behold. Laliberté's surrealistic images are also a fundraising tool: Proceeds from their sale will go to One Drop, his non-profit organization devoted to water equality and conservation around the world.

With no small measure of childlike whimsy, Laliberté compared the experience of photographing the earth from space to watching passing clouds: “Like when you're on earth and you're in a park or a field and you lay down on your back and watch the clouds move. Since I was a kid and I watched those clouds. I was always [seeing] animals and characters. This time, I was in the reverse situation. I was in the sky watching earth and looking at all those shapes.” Orbiting the earth, Laliberté witnessed 14 sunrises and sunsets a day. From the zoomed out perspective of space, the profound fragility and smallness of our planet becomes inescapable. The future of the human species hangs in the balance.

 “When you're flying up there,” he said, “you have those moments where you're looking at space, at the infinite, and you see that fragile planet, you see that little tiny layers protect it from the void, from darkness, from immense number of stars. And you start to feel a little worried about this planet that looks so fragile in this universe. You know there's life somewhere. We cannot be alone. But so far the human species has not yet achieved the challenge of finding other life or another place where we could live ... you start to tell yourself, well maybe we're just another species passing by. You start to hope that we will start organizing to survive on this planet longer than we would if we don't take care of it.”

ARTINFO spoke to Laliberté about his project before the opening of the show. 

Do you feel your career in the circus prepared you for space more than the average civilian?

I would say yes, in terms of the high spirit I brought into this project. Obviously, I knew that there would be a lot of resistance from some of the [space] community, related to space tourists. So I think my background as a street performer and entertainer was a big asset. After I had demonstrated that I was training, that I was focused, bringing humor and entertaining them permitted me to connect with them. That permitted some great bonding with the community. I think they remember me for that, as well as for being great participant because I did everything pretty much right. 

Which photographers do you admire? Did any of them inspire this project?

Yann Arthus-Bertrand. He did a book called ‘La Terre Vue du Ciel.’ I spoke with him once, and the state of mind in which he was taking these pictures was a little bit like what I was going through. And yes, he's a professional photographer and it did inspire me. The only difference is that I was higher. Also, Peter Beard is somebody who brings some amazing passion and interaction with the picture. I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different. 

Out of the 40 photographs in the show, do you have a favorite image?

There's one that's very special for me: the one way in the back. It’s just that little blue layer, just like black on black. This is the space equivalent of the green flash on earth. You know there's a green flash when you watch the sunset over the water. If there aren’t any clouds and no humidity, when the sun hits — in the last moment that the sunray touches the waterline — it creates a kind of green flash laser. This is the reverse. Just before the sun rises, there's that little blue [light] that lasts a fraction of a second. After, it just blinds you out. That was a moment I was trying to get but I was missing all the time. That was the most difficult picture that I took and I had to try it everyday. I had to get it right on that moment and, finally, I got it, so I was very, very happy. So that picture, for me, is a little more special than the others. 

What about space surprised you the most?  

Discovering a community of people. I realized how small this community was when I joined it and how fantastic it was. The community is very restricted. I was number 540. It was like being with people who were the pioneers, the Christopher Columbuses of space. What these guys were risking, putting those firecrackers under their butts and shooting into space in cans. When I was training, there was a lot of interesting technical stuff—a lot of boring stuff too. But the storytelling. Sitting down and listening to those famous cosmonauts telling their stories was the best part for me.

Would you ever visit space again?

Anytime! 

To see images from Guy Laliberté exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, click on the slideshow.

The Armory Show, one of the world's leading contemporary art fairs, celebrates its 100th anniversary this year in its usual location on Piers 92 & 94 in Manhattan. Thursday, March 7th - Saturday, March 9th, 12pm to 8 pm Sunday, March 10th, 12pm to 7 pm. Opening Day takes place Wednesday, March 6th for invited guests.

– Tate Apologizes for Kraftwerk Kraziness: In response to the incredible — but, in light of a similar fiasco earlier this year at MoMA, entirely predictable — online rush for tickets to German electronic music group Kraftwerk's eight-show concert series in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, which crashed the museum's website, the institution has issued an apology to frustrated fans who weren't able to secure tickets to the now-sold out shows. "Some customers came to Tate Modern and we made the late decision to sell tickets to them to avoid their disappointment," the statement explains. "We are sorry that this was not communicated as an official route to buy tickets and subsequently led to more frustration from other customers trying to buy tickets online and by telephone." [Tate]

– Greenberg Van Doren Closes: The 13-year-old space at 730 Fifth Avenue, which specializes in postwar and contemporary art, is shutting its doors next Friday. Co-owner Ronald K. Greenberg will go on to deal privately from St. Louis, while his partner, John Van Doren, is teaming up with newly-minted Art Dealers Association of America president Dorsey Waxter to form a new gallery. Van Doren Waxter will open February 20 on the Upper East Side with an exhibition of canvases by John McLaughlin. [NYT]

– QE2 Receives Royal Portfolio for Jubilee: London's Royal Academy has gifted 97 works by 93 artist members to Queen Elizabeth II to mark the Diamond Jubilee, including works by David Hockney — who famously turned down her commission for an official royal portrait — Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, and more, all of which will go on view in an exhibition at Buckingham Palace's Queen's Gallery next year. "It's a really transformative gift, something entirely new to us, and it allows us to do something we haven't done before," said Martin Clayton, who will curate the exhibition. "The Queen has seen photographs of all of the works and she is delighted." [Telegraph]

– Rap Mogul Dame Dash Expands Gallery Empire: Fresh from opening his Poppington Art Gallery on the Lower East Side's Orchard Street, hip hop mogul and former Jay-Z business partner Damon Dash is planning to open outposts of his art space DD172 in South Carolina and Hong Kong. "South Carolina is the New York of the South," Dash said. "I like the town and there is a strong undiscovered artistic community from music to art." [AllHipHop]

– Berlin's Kennedy Museum Gets a Makeover: The Kennedys is not only the title of a television miniseries — it is also, apparently, the name of a private German museum tracing the life and influence of John F. Kennedy and his family. That museum reopened this month after an extensive five-month renovation and expansion. Exhibits chronicle the former president's 1962 visit to the divided city of Berlin as well as the style of first lady Jackie. [WSJ]

– Embattled Vancouver Art Gallery Asks Artists for Help: In response to ongoing criticisms of its administrative operations and curatorial vision — which resulted in a petition signed by over 200 of Canada's leading curators, museum workers, and artists including Jeff Wall — the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) has created an artist advisory group who will have input in the development and planning of the institution's new building. "It is critical to us that the voices of those who work in the visual arts are heard through this process," VAG director Kathleen Bartels said. "This new advisory group will ensure the needs of those who will most benefit from a new Gallery will be well represented." [Globe and Mail]

– "Girl With a Pearl Earring" Gets a Room of Her Own: Vermeer's masterpiece "Girl With a Pearl Earring" will be among 15 paintings shown at the Frick Collection in New York for "Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis," which opens next fall. The exhibition features highlights from that museum, which is closed for two years for renovations. To allow the other paintings to get proper due, chief curator Colin Bailey will hang Vermeer's most famous painting in its own gallery. [NYT]

– Paris's Record-Breaking Hopper Retro: As it nears the halfway mark of its 100-day run with a to-date attendance of 365,000, the Grand Palais's current survey of American painter Edward Hopper is on track to become France's second-best attended exhibition ever by the time it closes on January 28, 2013, falling just short of a Claude Monet retrospective that drew 910,000 visitors last year. "Only one or two of his paintings are well known, like 'Nighthawks' or 'House by the Railroad,'" said Didier Ottinger, the exhibition's curator. "And yet we have a blockbuster show on our hands." [WSJ]

– India's Biennial Kicks Off, Semi-Ready: "India, with its penchant for last-minute event preparation, seems to have created a new type of art fair, the art-in-progress show," writes Minu Ittyipe of the country's first contemporary art biennial, which kicked off on December 12. Many artists were still hammering, soldering, and whirring as the doors opened, though the centerpiece of the main exhibition, a site-specific work by Ernesto Neto, was in place. "One rarely gets to see artists at work at other biennales," said the Beirut-based critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. [NYT]

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Hello Kitty as Muse: Curator Roger Gastman Culls Artistic Odes to the Iconic Cat

From Cirque du Soleil to the Stratosphere: Guy Laliberte Talks Space Photography

ALTERNATIVES: Inside Hallwalls, Unlikely Incubator of the Upstate Avant Garde

Zippers, Stitches, and GIFs: FIT Looks at Fashion and Technology

Sotheby’s Elects William Ruprecht to Head Board of Directors

Damien Hirst and Gagosian Split After 17 Years

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

Temptation, beauty, danger… and pizza. Tom Parker Bowles takes a bite (and then another bite, and then another) out of Naples. How did it come to this? Floating, limp and bloated, in Homer’s wine-dark sea, a pale blob with a three-beer smile. It’s... Thursd

VERO BEACH, Florida — Gert and Uwe Tobias missed out on the fanfare of Art Basel this year; while the smart set were reveling in hedonism, the Transylvania-born twins spent the week hard at work, three hours outside of Miami. Between rounds of golf and going to bed at a “reasonable hour,” they spent most of their time installing their latest exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery at Windsor, in the much lesser-known Florida area of Vero Beach. 

Following last year’s solo show of Beatriz Milhazes, this marks The Gallery at Windsor’s second annual exhibition in a three-year collaboration with Whitechapel. The virtual opposite of Art Basel or Whitechapel Gallery’s London homebase, Windsor is a remote, gated community accessible only to its wealthy members and their guests, and is by far the most isolated venue the Tobias brothers have ever presented work in. The installation they’ve created — small-scale collages of dark, dismembered body parts and folkloric monsters, or contrasting large-scale, vibrantly colored woodcuts of butterflies and birds — required considerable planning. At their family compound in Cologne, the brothers built a scale model of the Florida gallery and filled it with miniature replicas of their works, to find out how best to capitalize on the space. Unlike most printmakers, the Tobias Brothers’ work has the frequent habit of extending beyond the frame and into the gallery itself. The result of this three-dimensional remote mapping is a physical journey for their viewers that alternates between the sinister and the playful.  

The limited-edition poster the Tobias brothers created for the show is a butterfly-cum-coat-of-arms, the wings adorned with the artists’ initials in a type of tropical climate heraldry, as well as an ode to this bizarrely secluded gallery. Whitechapel director and curator Iwona Blazwick, who likes to think of the serene, beachside landscape as a destination art retreat, realizes the unique dual nature of her audience. In addition to artworld professionals who deliberately make the trek to see the show (we spotted MoMA director Glenn Lowry at the exhibition opening, taking a detour on the commute home from Miami) there are Windsor residents and vacationers who “have never had any contact with any professional art,” she told ARTINFO. “It’s quite a challenge, really,” she added, speaking of the curatorial process, “but ultimately what we’re always dedicated to is maintaining the integrity of the art and the artists’ vision.”

To see the work of Gert & Uwe Tobias at Windsor Gallery, click the slideshow.

Our most-talked-about stories in Visual Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, December 10 - 14, 2012:

WHAT:“Chagall and the Circle of Jewish Painters of the 20th Century”

WHEN: December 4 – January 5, 2013

WHERE: Wally Findlay Galleries International, Inc., 165 Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, FL

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: The celebrated modernist master has long been regarded as one of the most respected European artists of his time. Now, thanks to a new exhibition at Wally Findlay Galleries’s Palm Beach location, his artwork and legacy are being appreciated for a different reason. A selection of Marc Chagall’s paintings, ranging from 1942 to 1980, can be seen next to a group of fellow expat Jewish contemporaries he mentored and worked alongside in what has became known as the Jewish School of Paris — an important enclave that developed in the city during the first part of the 20th century of artists with Jewish heritage who came to Paris when it was the epicenter of the art world.

“Chagall and the Circle of Jewish Painters of the 2oth Century” places several of his ethereal circus-themed paintings next to pieces by important contemporaries like Moïse Kisling and Emmanuel Mané-Katz. Kisling’s use of color is an example of the bold fauvist movement of the period, and Mané-Katz’s cubist and expressionist elements show a tendency towards fusing styles — a trait he shared with Chagall.

Chagall experimented across media, delving into painting, sculpture, etching, stage sets, and even stained glass. The time he spent in Paris was his most influential, and the group of Jewish artists he was associated with helped fuel the atmosphere of innovation that has become synonymous with the Jewish School of Paris. The loose collective is also remembered as a place where international Jewish artists thrived and were integral to the history of cubism, fauvism, expressionism, and modernism. 

To see artwork from the exhibition, click the slideshow here.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

* El Anatsui, “Broken Bridge II,” the High Line at 21st Street, through December 2013

Like the High Line itself, the Ghanaian artist's largest work to date — a 157-foot-wide tapestry made from mirrors and corrugated metal panels that clings to the wall of a park-adjacent building like a winter blanket — recycles something forgotten and creates a monument to ingenuity in the process. —Julia Halperin

* Trisha Baga, “The Biggest Circle,” Greene Naftali, 526 West 26th Street, 8th floor, through January 12, 2013

At times Trisha Baga's multi-sensory, three-dimensional video and sculptural installations incorporate the viewer as participant, while at other times the viewer is witness to an immersive, ethereal stream of consciousness unfolding in the gallery, enabling her to be simultaneously over-stimulated and fixated on small details of the constantly shifting colors, sounds, lights, and soundtrack. —Sara Roffino

* Amelia Biewald, “Werther Effects,” Magnan Metz Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, through January 12, 2013

Taking visual cues from Elizabethan England, particularly the period's uncomfortable fashions and the widespread popularity of “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — which inspired readers to mimic the main character's style and sadness — Amelia Biewald has created works of high drama including sculptures that are undeniably eye-catching, but which remind us that it's in two dimensions that historical periods are most elegantly explored. —Allison Meier

* “Eight Sculptors,” Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, through December 22

The stand-out of this mini-survey of contemporary sculpture — which includes Whiteread-ian household objects reproduced in translucent materials and an indecipherable, Urs Fischer-esque installation with rotting food — is Liz Glynn's interactive installation “Anonymous Needs and Desires (Gaza/Giza)” (2012), where she invites viewers to discover the cast lead objects in a giant set of color-coded drawers, each corresponding to a type of item frequently smuggled across the Egypt-Palestine border in the last five years, an engaging and weighty rumination on the shifting values and fluid distribution of everyday objects. —Benjamin Sutton

* Keltie Ferris, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, through January 12, 2013

If you could yank a Pink Floyd video from the screen and throw it against a wall, the dripping pixels and psychedelic splatter might look like a duller version of a Keltie Ferris painting, which ushers in a kind of neon-Impressionism for the digital age. —Rachel Corbett

* Peter Rogiers, Galerie Richard, 514 West 24th Street, through February 2, 2013

Belgian sculptor Rogiers claims to take as much inspiration from comic books and B-movies as he does from high art, and the steel and cast-aluminum sculptures in his New York solo debut — particularly the torqued and razor-edged palm tree “Zilver Fruit,” and the cyan carapace of his “Bootsmann” — would be equally at home on the set of “Blade Runner” as they are here in Chelsea. —Lori Fredrickson

EMERGING is a regular column where ARTINFO spotlights an up-and-coming artist.

Within the murals and drawings of Mark Licari, objects, animals, and organic material collide in a glorious chain of growth and decay. Flowers burst in puffs of dirt from dresser drawers and worn men’s suits; a vortex consumes household plants, records, disembodied eyes, and a television set punctured by tentacles; a house rockets into a sky clouded with letters, trailing its plumbing like the roots of a extirpated tree, as an airplane soars out of its chimney.

“The natural world and science have always been interests of mine,” Licari told ARTINFO. “I'm interested in certain general themes such as growth, decay, energy, technology, and ecology. How things connect is a recurring question in the work.”

The Los Angeles-based artist was born in Atlanta in 1975, later moving to Charlotte, North Carolina before earning his BFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997. He soon worked his way west to Los Angeles in 1998, graduating with an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2000. He has stayed in the city ever since.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), his mural “Deciduous Flyer” is currently offering a dynamic entrance to the “Drawing Surrealism” exhibition. Rather than “attempting to connect with [his] subconscious mind or break down the conscious mind” like the historic artists in the show, he gathered a maelstrom of images to generate a surreal narrative. In the mural, a series of contraptions including a vacuum cleaner and wheelbarrow join through twists of pipes and tubing, with a fan whirring out of the mechanical commotion like a sunflower, approached by an eager buzzing bee.

“I like the idea of unused or unneeded parts just falling off and new parts regrowing,” he explained. “I want the piece to function with the viewer as a ‘choose your own adventure story’ of sorts. So I depict a small part and the viewer can then wonder about what happened and where things are going and it is different for everyone.”

He cites one of his many influences as Jean Tinguely’s large motorized sculpture “Cascade,” which resides in the Carillon Building lobby in Charlotte. The kinetic mobile, with its chaotic mix of objects like antlers, the hood of a Ferrari, and arches of lights, had “a whimsy to it that made a lasting impression” for a young Licari. His mural at the Drawing Center in 2005 is an example of his playful explorations in staging conflicts between the manmade and organic, with anteaters twisting their tongues through vents, searching for ants in a strange apparatus that belches out insects and yellow goo.

Although he draws intuitively, he’s constantly gathering drawings in sketchbooks and journals that emerge in his work, often incorporating the architecture of space into site-specific pieces. At the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia this year, he painted two murals on Cockatoo Island, one of a ship moored down by consuming plants, and another of a vine coiling around a tower — a sort of real-world version of his mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in Florida also this year, where he created a water tower being crumpled down by a grasping vine, water spilling down from its 32-foot height.

Currently, Licari is planning for a summer show at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen and working on a new lithograph at Hamilton Press in Venice, California, continuing to capture in detail the clash between organic and manmade, where destruction spawns the unexpected and new.

To see more of Mark Licari's works, click on the slideshow.