Kutlug Ataman, a winner of this year’s Abraaj Capital Art Prize, recently awarded at Art Dubai, recorded a performance entitled Strange Space using himself as subject wandering through the desert blindfolded and barefoot. The performance, part of his most recent project Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, was inspired by a classical Mesopotamian folk tale, in which the hero is blinded by the love of the female character and condemned to walk the desert searching for her, only to burst into flames when they finally encounter one another. Ataman uses this ancient tale to symbolize the coming together of East and West, or as the fair’s catalogue states, “as a metaphor for the encounter of modernity and tradition, for their reciprocal attraction and the trauma this attraction may cause.”

Stella Lai’s paintings are so bright and lush that it’s easy to get lost in their beauty, and not notice the macabre cast of characters lurking in the background, until it’s too late. Each piece is delivered to the viewer with a smile and a wink–inviting us in to play, but not telling us what game. In classical poses, women sit atop Lilly pads or wander in winter wonderlands, only things are never quite as they should be. Born in Hong Kong and currently living in Los Angeles, Stella Lai is a graduate of California College of the Arts who has exhibited internationally, and whose work currently graces the cover of Giant Robot Magazine, and has been seen in VOGUE China and Flash Art.

DailyServing.com’s Allison Gibson recently got a chance to pick Lai’s brain about her multinational inspirations and the hidden messages found in the worlds she creates.

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Currently on view at White Walls Gallery in San Francisco is new work on paper by artist Alex Lukas in the exhibition titled and another shall rise to take her place. The artist creates mixed media works, produced with ink, acrylic, gouache and silkscreen, often on book pages, which depict city-scapes submerged in rising water and desolate lands that are void of human presence. The works, which have a tranquil yet ominous tenor, explore a new placement in the history of landscape painting. Though never experienced first hand by the artist, the works seem to resonate with contemporary disaster imagery, often seen on television and through news sources. The new works evoke a very plausible scenario, which depicts the potential future for a new American landscape.

Lukas is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and founded Cantab Publishing in January 2001. The artist has completed the recent exhibitions In Defense of Home, In Defense of Industry at Iceberger in San Francisco and Wreck at Installations at EMF in Cambridge.

Closing today at the Scion Installation Space in Culver City is Sao Paulo a group exhibition curated by Choque Cultural Gallery featuring the work of nine artists from Sao Paulo. The exhibition, which mixed on-site creations with work that was shipped in, offered wide artistic diversity and provided some insight into the artistic activity that is currently present in that city.

Scion’s following exhibition PaperShapers, curated by Giant Robot, will feature 10 artists who each work with paper, as opposed to on paper. The exhibition, which opens early April, is said to contain several innovative works that push the boundary of this material. PaperShapers will be on view from April 11 to May 2, 2009.

Regeneration Gap is the title of a new installation by Canadian-born artist Jarod Charzewski on view at the Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition features three major works, each representing a cross section of a hypothetical landscape, complete with revealed geological layers, created entirely out of used clothes. The artist obtains the used clothes from local Goodwill stores, which are given on loan from the store and returned at the closing of the exhibition. Also on view are several large-format photographs from a previous installation titled Scarp, which was presented this fall at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina.

The artist’s work illustrates the reality of consumer culture’s effect on the landscape by actually reconstructing a cross section of the landscape made entirely of used clothes. Perhaps the most interesting component of this process is that the work is created using recycled materials which are taken from and reintroduce into the market place, without actually creating any new consumption.

Charzewski is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and has completed recently solo exhibitions Vortices at Trinity Square Video in Toronto and Vanishing Point at Ace Art in Winnipeg, Canada. The artist currently teaches sculpture at the College of Charleston, School of the Arts.

Currently on view at Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL) in Chelsea is new work by artist Dana Schutz, in the exhibition Missing Pictures. This marks the fourth solo exhibition for the artist at Zach Feuer Gallery. The show mostly contains large-scale paintings supplemented with a few smaller works.

The paintings in Missing Pictures depict a variety of social situations contained within both interior and landscape scenes. Images of people engaging in a game of chess and group massage are activated through a surreal fragmentation leaving some figures literally ripped with seams exposed. Many of the figures, which are loosely rendered, seem to be rather comfortable existing within the turbulent and sometimes mildly horrific scenes.

Formally, the artist utilizes a diverse application of paint within this new body of work. Stains, washes and linear mark making exist alongside thickly applied paints. The resulting effect seems to make the paintings dissolve before the viewer.

Schutz, who was born in 1976 and graduated from Columbia University in 2002, has exhibited internationally. The artist’s work appears in the permanent collections of many museums including the Guggenheim, NY, the Hammer Museum in LA and the Museum of Modern Art in NY, among others.

Currently on view at 2×2 Projects in Amsterdam is a solo show of work by Berlin based artist Torsten Ruehle, entitled FILTER. FILTER is Ruehle’s debut solo exhibition in Amsterdam, and features a variety of his recent works in conjunction with the early 2009 release of a published catalog of his work, also entitled FILTER. Ruehle’s astutely political and socially provocative paintings are at first imagined by the artist when he spots images in newspapers, movie stills and even other painters’ work. In a manner of creative interpretation that sometimes mingles with appropriation, and other times gets so worked over by the artist’s hand that any trace of the former image is lost for good, Ruehle’s paintings have a childlike accessibility to them, despite the often heavy subject matter. With thick black pigment pen outlines, citing his graffiti art background, he presents us with the essence of the scene without overindulging in visual minutiae. FILTER opened on March 21st and runs through April 25, 2009.

Torsten Ruehle was born in Dresden, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited in solo shows internationally, including at Galerie Kai Hilgemann in Berlin and Galerie Hubert Schwarz in Greifswald.