Survival Game , Misako Inaoka’s, motley menagerie of animal hybrids, is currently on display through June 20th at the David Salow Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. The gallery is lined with tiny eye-level platforms staging metallic conglomerations in mid-stride. Perhaps they are on their way to complete utilitarian tasks for which their bodies have evolved industrial, and sometimes, military adaptations. Two chess boards complete with sets of dueling pawns, rooks, queens, knights, and bishops are also included in the show.

Inaoka creates these miniatures by seamlessly fusing plastic and rubber toys. She applies a metallic finish that enhances the textural details of the figurines and gives them the initial appearance of cast metal. Sometimes, she even uses battery operated motion sensors that detect changes in light or sound. As a result, when viewing Survival Game, a bird-walrus-chimpanzee with a shark on its rear end may begin to wiggle and chirp as you approach. But, Inaoka doesn’t need bells and whistles to entice viewers. She taps into the endless possibilities of adaptive radiation, a principle of animal classification that relates to evolution and metamorphosis within a group of organisms as they adapt to new ecological environments. The creatures’ radical combinations of animal species and man-made mechanisms are a challenge to the logic of natural selection and therefore, a catalyst to the imagination. In Inaoka’s world, an inefficient adaptation as seen in Sharksend or Double Deer Horns can be an asset simply because the form is so captivating.

San Francisco galleries have been featuring Inaoka’s solo exhibits since 2002 when The Back Room Gallery presented The Microfiche. Her resume shows off an extensive list of awards, grants, and residencies ranging from her alma mater, Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honors Program to a National Endowment for the Arts Artistic Excellence Grant for her MacDowell residency. Survival Game is Inaoka’s solo debut in southern California.

The Whitney Live artist-in-residence program offers performance artists a work space and an audience. Over the course of a year, the resident artist performs works in progress and gives visitors a glimpse into his or her unique work process. The inaugural Whitney Live artist is Colin Gee, a writer/director/performer who studied with acclaimed French mime Jacques Lecoq and worked as a principle Cirque du Soleil clown between 2001 and 2004. Gee caught the attention of Whitney curators when, during the museum’s Calder exhibition, he proposed a performance that commemorated Calder’s “Circus” miniatures. The performance can be seen in the above video and updates on Gee’s projects can be found at his Whitney blog. Most recently, he posted scenes from “Cathedral,” a project in which Gee mimes in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Currently in its last week on view at Catherine Clark Gallery is a solo show of work by Montreal-based photographers and brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez. The exhibition marks the brothers’ second at the San Francisco gallery, and displays a survey of their work over the past seven years, since their collaboration began. The twelve large-scale photographs on view depict scenes that have been exhaustively staged by the artists and are rich with Hollywood-rivaling sets, props and lighting. These moments on display are like fleeting beats of time caught as stills on a film reel, and at the same time appear openly contrived– unashamed that they have been so heavily orchestrated. The artificiality of these moments, in the darker themed photographs, evokes an eerie sensation that grips the viewer. The discomfort is that these scenes seem to be depicted as fantasies in some twisted mind. In Abduction (2004), a generic, mustached and pasty white man kneels ominously at a little girls bedside as she seemingly opens gifts from her suitor that are intended to lure her to his windowless van.

The star of the show is John Mark Karr (2007), a portrait caught in mirror’s reflection of the pedophile who made a false confession to the murder of child beauty pageant queen Jon Benet Ramsey. While in many of the photographs the models are members of the brothers’ social circle, only the real John Mark Karr could perform as authentically and disturbingly as the artists imagined for this shot.

There are quieter, more subtle moments in the show, such as Drifter (2007), wherein a stained denim-donning vagrant pauses for reflection at a spot in the urban wilderness where a train track meets a chain link fence.

Carlos and Jason Sanchez have exhibited their work internationally at Caren Golden Fine Art, New York; Torch Gallery, Amsterdam; and Parisian Laundry, Montreal, among many others. Their work is in several public and private collections, including Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and 21c Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Both men studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where Carlos earned his BFA.

On view until June 28 at Rowley Kennerk Gallery, is an exhibition of works by Gaylen Gerber. In this exhibition, Gerber presents three artworks in a modified exhibition space. The work confuses easy distinctions between object and context and heightens awareness of visual perception in a way that questions how we differentiate what we are looking at from what surrounds it. Gerber is interested in addressing ideas surrounding perception and particularly the role of context in perception. Gerber’s own work often acts as the contextual ground for the expressions of other artists. For this exhibition, Gerber continues to examine the role of the contextual ground in the interpretation of art, but also specifically highlights the background as an expressive element itself.

Recognizing the shifting relationships between deviation and the normative ground is at the heart of Gerber’s exhibition and draws attention to a central aspect of perception, which is that to perceive something at all you must first be able to distinguish it from its background.

Gaylen Gerber has exhibited widely. Recent solo exhibitions and cooperative projects include: The Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, Luxembourg; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen, Bremen, Germany; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, Switzerland: and the FRAC-Bourgogne and Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France.

When Jeff Zimmermann came to Charleston, South Carolina magnolias were in bloom, so he painted them, picked fresh and also withered up, placed in bottles. He found local faces and, with a lightness of hand, made these characters breathe with realism that’s expressive, showing the subtleties of identity, yet graphic enough to pop from a distance.

During his artist’s residency at Redux Contemporary Art Center, Zimmermann painted directly on the white gallery walls and the exterior facade, incorporating objects that seem to reference our city in an exhibition titled, Self Control. We see a golf ball suspended over a glass of wine, props of the prevalent resort lifestyle, contrasted by an empty wine bottle wrapped in a brown bag. But the imagery is obscure and not made to be metaphors. The viewer is invited to contextualize and draw associations between objects and familiar, but unidentified, faces.

Zimmermann is known for seeking out a variety of quotidian subjects that give richness to our communities and daily experiences. He’s not idealizing famous and powerful leaders in history, but instead he seeks to empower and honor regular folks, and be a painter who loves his paintings. However, Zimmermann played around with the historical portrait while at Redux, incorporating monochromatic busts of a couple famous dead white guys, and also Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize winning economist who popularized laissez-faire policy. These characters are polarizing in a state like South Carolina that votes “red” and whose tourists come to see the architectural masterpieces of a slave economy.

Zimmermann is renowned for his large-scale mural projects, most recently completing a five-story wall in Memphis, TN, titled A Note for Hope: Turn the Page. His work has been featured institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, but also on the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. His recent commissions include: Nike, House of Blues Chicago, LaSalle Bank, Whole Foods Inc., DreamWorks LLC, and Rhodes College. A Chicago native, he obtained a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has since gained international notoriety for his works. DailyServing has previously featured Zimmermann’s mural projects and object-based installations.

On view at the Andrew Shire Gallery through June 13 is a group exhibition entitled, Clutter, featuring installation and sculpture from six California-based artists including Nancy Braver, Helen Chung, Carmen Daniel, Chris Ellis, Chris Sicat, and Keith Walsh. As the name suggests, the show prompts the viewer to consider the work as it exists in relation to the space. Each artist represents a different approach to presenting an object in space, causing the exhibition to be diverse, and both conceptually and visually appealing.

The work of Nancy Braver uses light as a primary means of projecting her geometric objects on to the wall. In, Ellipse 4 (Chubby), she uses an interesting combination of acrylic and stainless steel, and does not let negative space go to waste. Her laser cut shapes intend to play with the surrounding space and light, making its placement integral to the success of the composition.

Keith Walsh’s furniture-like pieces question our conventional methods of organizing personal objects and memories. Through pieces like, Cab 3, 2007, Walsh suggests a new sense of order, one that challenges traditional notions of functionality.

Mario Wagner

This Saturday in Culver City, Cerasoli Gallery will present new work from three artists: Matt Phillips, Mario Wagner and Seth Curcio. The three artists implement collage to reference sound, vintage imagery and mass commerce. Each show will run from this Saturday, June 13th through July 8th.

In gallery one at Cerasoli Gallery, Matt Phillips will present a new body of vibrant paintings that play on shape, color and movement. Matt Phillips work subtly references sound, textile making and Modernism through patterned visual space that pulse and vibrate. Matt Phillips graduated from Boston University in 2007 and has exhibited with Mehr gallery, Place Space Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents, in New York City. He has also exhibited in 1000DAYS, the DailyServing exhibition at the Scion Installation Space in LA, as well as with Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC and SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine. Check out his interview with DailyServing.

Seth Curcio

In gallery two, new work by German-born artist and illustrator, Mario Wagner, depict vintage settings that combine 1960s culture with elements of modernism. The result is a surreal landscape of figures wrapped in visual elements of color and shape, alluding to a time of overindulgence and a false sense of nostalgia. Wagner’s work has been shown with 2AGENTEN GALLERY, in Berlin, the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco, and the Meat Market Gallery in Washington. His illustrations and artwork have been commissioned by publications such as Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

In gallery three, DailyServing’s publisher and editor, Seth Curcio, will present new work of collage and painting which comment on image distribution, constructed reality and contemporary culture. Curcio’s images resemble familiar contemporary landscapes, yet quickly splinter, dissolve and reconstruct into a new environment. Implementing a complex series of collage and painting, the surface and imagery combine to create a space both familiar and unknown. Curcio is the co-founder of DailyServing and has worked as the Director of Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC. His work has been shown across the Southeast and will be featured in the upcoming issue of Beautiful/Decay Magazine.