Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York City, 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.)
Linda Ganjian, "Overview" at Auxiliary Projects, 2 St. Nicholas Avenue, #25, Brooklyn, through May 5
Like an OCD-afflicted city planner bent on making streets and buildings conform to the rigid patterning and symmetry of mathematical formula, traditional Middle Eastern tiles, or American quilts, Linda Ganjian has transformed the features glimpsed on her daily elevated train commute into a series of small drawings and a large sculpture in which air ducts, barbed wire, billboards, bollards, and banal bits of blight are organized into ornate sequences and shapes that render these ubiquitous urban objects abstract and strange. — Benjamin Sutton
Peter Hutchinson, “The Logic of Mountains, 1963 - 2013: A 50-Year Survey of Constructions, Collages, Books, and Film” at Freight + Volume, 530 West 24th Street, through April 13
The delicate, diaristic, and fragmented poetry with which Peter Hutchinson adorns his photographic collages and assemblage pieces is more honest and intelligible than any artist statement could be; it reads like a 50-year running commentary written by the artist himself, and offers a second entry into the subtle, abstracted beauty of the parts of human nature on which his works muse. — Alanna Martinez
Will Kurtz, “Another Shit Show” at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th Street, through April 27
While I’m largely unsure what lasting artistic legacy this show might have, I will say that Will Kurtz’s ability to craft convincing dog poop — not to mention numerous breeds of dog and even a human — out of paper maché is second-to-none, and therefore it’s worth stopping in. — Shane Ferro
Hiraki Sawa, "Figment," at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, through April 27
The narrative of this show's centerpiece, a two-chanel video installation featuring an unnamed amnesiac protagonist quietly observing the objects in an apartment while they come to life — turntable records that unwind like thread and zip in and out of invisible crevices to form repetitive patterns, clockwork mechanisms of lamps and timepieces that eventually meld with their human counterpart — provokes a sense of anxiety that's calmed by a rigorous sense of visual order and a palindromic audio composition, so that the video's viewer (like its subject) loses track of time. — Lori Fredrickson
B. Wurtz, “Recent Works” at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, through April 27
Had Calder gone to the voodoo fetish markets of Togo, the result might have been something akin to B. Wurtz’s tiny, delicate sculptures made from wood, wire, brass, ribbon, buttons, and string, whose charm enthrall and conjure whimsy that is surprising for such pedestrian things. — Rozalia Jovanovic