Daniel Benayun’s collages are like peculiar and whimsical, outsider-art, inside jokes. Layered atop obscure maps or vague and crinkled book pages, these postcards introduce a cast of mythical, and otherwise, characters along with an impressive postage stamp collection, through illustration and craft. The pieces are steeped with an endearing dose of what seems to be the recollection of a boyhood fascination with knights, sea life and European and early American history. Benayun’s work is currently on view in the group show, Artigeddon, at The Distillery Gallery in Boston. The exhibition consciously features the work of over twenty artists from Boston and elsewhere, all of whom are currently without gallery representation. Along with Benayun, the show will exhibit the work of Vanessa Irzyk, Kristen Mills, Josh Falk and Fish McGill, among many others.

Daniel Benayun is currently a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited recently in a solo presentation at Sowa Gallery in Boston and at several other venues in Boston, MA and New Hampshire. As an illustrator, he has recently been commissioned by the New Hampshire Institute of Art and musician Shai Erlichman.

Currently on view at the Shooting Gallery in San Francisco is a new exhibition titled Terrestrial Syndrome, with new paintings by artists Kevin E. Taylor and Erik Otto. Taylor’s work features several different creatures engaging one another within a surrealistic landscape. While the work remains shrouded in mystery and coded with visual symbols, it is clear that the actions of the creatures are a metaphor for the uncertainty of our time. The creatures embody both human and animal characteristics, each empowered with a conscious and the ability to struggle both physically and intellectually with their surroundings.

Taylor is originally from Charleston, South Carolina and received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. His recent solo exhibition exhibitions include Posture at Swarm Gallery in Oakland, Animalitia at Anno Domini in San Jose and the artist has a forth coming exhibition with Cerasoli Gallery in Los Angeles.

Photo caption: Back to Black, 2008 HK Zamani

Opening September 11th is the inaugural exhibition, entitled On the Shoulders of Davids, at JAUS (pronounced “house”), a new gallery in West Los Angeles, run by artists Chris Tallon, Helen Geisler and Ichiro Irie. From the onset JAUS’ mission seems clear, albeit divergent from that of many new commercial spaces: to promote the work and so-called DIY culture of artists who have, or currently run, art spaces. In essence, JAUS seeks to celebrate the unique moment when “dealer” isn’t a singular role, but the dealer is also a working artist, showing his own work at various other spaces with artist’s vigor, and at the same time promoting the work of his art colleagues at his own space. JAUS also seems to have a hopeful streak in its mission, as it’s opening shop at a time when news of gallery closings is almost so prevalent that it isn’t really news in LA. As JAUS puts it, “Based on the assumption that art thrives in times of trouble [citing elsewhere the landmark opening and history-making of CBGB in New York City during the 1973 OPEC petroleum embargo], JAUS opens its doors to the public with an exhibition that celebrates artist run culture and the DIY ethos. The title of the show is a reference to the story of ‘David and Goliath’; that JAUS stands not on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of artists who are/were willing to take on the big bad world [of art].”

The over thirty artists exhibited in On the Shoulders of Davids include: Mexico City-based Yoshua Okon, of La Panaderia; Matthew Furmanski and Monica Furmanksi, of 643 Project Space; the Los Angeles-based collective, Slanguage; Ronald Lopez, of Aden Art Center in Istanbul and many others.

Amanda Heng interacted with a group of over thirty participants on a performance walk titled, Let’s Walk Some More. Organised by The Substation, the performance traced and invoked Amanda’s personal memories of heritage sites in Singapore’s city area which have been demolished, re-used or left disused. Decked in yellow t-shirts, participants were led to share their reflections. Along the trail and at several sites, participants were prompted to spell out the words “Thank you for being part of our memories” from the printed letter on each t-shirt.

Amanda’s art practice began in the 1980s, and she was a founding member of the artist collectives, The Artists Village in 1988 and WITA (Women In the Arts) in 1999. She has exhibited internationally and her art practice concerning East-West and gender tensions in Singapore has extended towards recent explorations of memories and relationships in urban settings.

Photographed documentation of another performance piece by Amanda, Let’s Chat is currently on display at Curating Lab: 100 Objects (Remixed) presented by NUS Museum. Let’s Chat involves participants plucking the roots of bean sprouts to generate conversation, reminiscent of domestic communal practices in Southeast Asia. The exhibition will run till September 27th, and is part of Singapore Art Show 2009.

Amanda is currently working on the project, Singirl, investigating representations of gender and identity through the process of inviting women participants to join a community to form of contingent for Singapore’s National Day Parade in 2010.

Trevor Paglen

It is a common belief today that abstraction and politics don’t mix. We tend to think of formalism as either transcendent of problems like race and war, or on the other hand, beholden to its limitations as decoration, bought and sold in the marketplace. Reduced Visibility, curated by Core Program Critical Studies Resident Kurt Mueller at the Glassel School of Art in Houston, challenges these notions. Drawing on the rich history from the genesis of abstraction that engaged politics with movements such as the Russian Avant Garde, Mueller has assembled an array of artists that are deeply involved in both reduced form and sociological weight.

Rico Gatson

The exhibition of five artists includes Mark Lombardi’s obsessively researched and painstakingly drawn constellations of financial and political scandals. Once we get past the beautiful formations of delicately drawn graphite lines, we can see small notes that reference oil companies, Swiss banks and politicians from the US, Middle East and Latin America that sit somewhere between conspiracy theories and nightmarish truths. Also included are Trevor Paglen’s photographs of secret CIA and US military installations, shot with an astrophotography lens from up to 65 miles away. The resulting images look like a simple hazy horizon evocative of Mark Rothko’s late work.

Hellen Mirra

Lisa Oppenheim’s Multicultural Crayon Displacements (2008) is a series of photographs based on Crayola’s Multicultural crayon Set. Oppenheim photographed each of the 14 colors included in this set with red, green and blue filters. She then projected the resulting colored shapes onto photosensitive paper, assembling geometrical compositions loaded with questions of race. Rico Gatson’s video-sculpture History Lessons (2004) is a remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), clips of stereotypical depictions of African-Americans from 1930s and ’40s Hollywood films, and photographs from the 1965 Watts riots. Finally, Hellen Mirra uses sculpture and text to construct minimal forms which use pinecones and hand-sawn shipping pallets from Berlin’s Grunewald, referencing both minimalist sculpture and the fraught ecological history of industrialized Europe.

Rico Gatson (American, born 1966, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York), Helen Mirra (American, born 1970, lives and works in Cambridge, MA), Mark Lombardi (American, born 1951, died 2000), Lisa Oppenheim (American, born 1975, lives and works in New York, New York), and Trevor Paglen (American, born 1974, lives and works in Oakland, California).

Closing this week at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson entitled Take Your Time. Olafur Eliasson’s immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia.¬† Drawn from collections worldwide, the presentation spans over fifteen years of Eliasson’s career. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and natural elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer’s perception of place and self, foregrounding the sensory experience of¬†each work. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intense engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

Olafur Eliasson’s creations evoke or incorporate atmospheric conditions and landscapes while foregrounding the viewer’s sensory experience of the works. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson was organized by the MCA’s Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn, when she was Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and is on view May 1 to September 13, 2009.

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson has been organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an expanded version of the exhibition was previously on view in New York at MoMa and P.S.1.

Frencesca Gabbiani’s The Present, her new exhibition at Patrick Painter, opens on September 12. Gabbiani, known for richly detailed drawings that marry ornamentation with vacancy, has dedicated one of her new pieces to the Greek goddess Nyx, patron of the night. The exhibition’s venture into mythology will be accentuated by a series of decorated mirror pieces that pit surface and depth against each other. These issues – myth, decoration, shallowness – have been consistent motifs Gabbiani’s art and her new body of work promises to push them further.

Gabbiani, born in Montreal and raised in Switzerland, studied at Rijkskademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and Ecole Superieure des Beaux-art in Geneva before moving to Los Angeles. She graduated with an MFA from UCLA in 1997. Her work has appeared at the Armand Hammer Museum (she has also guest curated at the Hammer), Lora Reynolds Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other venues.

The Present will remain on view through October 24.