The journalistic expression “If it bleeds; it leads” is particularly resonant in Mexico, where an entire subgenre of daily tabloids, devoted to crime and disaster, cover train wrecks and murders in lurid detail. Enrique Metinides made a career as a crime photographer for these nota roja (“bloody news”), earning the sobriquet the “Mexican Weegee” for his obsessive chronicling of accidents and crime scenes throughout Mexico[.....]

Standing before the photographs from Bill Armstrong’s Infinity series, resistance is futile. Intense washes of color and uncertain, alluring forms beckon yet elude one’s grasp, and the encounter between viewer and work becomes a question not of looking but, more powerfully, of experiencing. Critical distance is collapsed, vision becomes a channel for sensation, and image expands into an all-encompassing, alternative reality. Such is the effect[.....]

In an unassuming brick building on a gray Willamsburg street, adjacent to a used car lot and several doors down from a polythene bag manufacturer, there is a portal to the West Coast. Kevin Cooley’s Skyward, currently on view at the Boiler—the project space of the Pierogi Gallery—captures the quintessence of Los Angeles life: the car as constant, the looping freeways, the towering palm trees[.....]

Xavier Cha‘s Untitled (2012), on view at 47 Canal through January 13th, positions four high definition video screens displaying a series of “screen tests” throughout the small gallery. These close-up video portraits present subjects alternately gazing at and away from the viewer, inviting the audience to scrutinize both the faces and backs of these heads. Jonathan Coward scores the videos with an intensified background noise[.....]

Eric Yahnker’s current solo show VIRGIN BIRTH N’ TURF, at The Hole through October 6, is a meticulous chronicle of canonical American cultural mediocrity. Walking into the vaulted white squareness of The Hole, I’m slammed from all sides by Yahnker’s enormous images — meticulously hand-drawn, magnified portraits of kitsch. Yahnker takes aesthetically unexalted elements of popular media, elevating the mediocre cultural staple and outfitting it[.....]

The other day, in a somewhat drowsy effort to shake my late-summer torpor, I decided to poke around online in search of some intriguing, under-the-radar gallery shows.  Rather quickly, and despite (or perhaps because of) the aimless, unfocused nature of my ramblings, I happened upon the just-concluded show Icy and Sot: Made in Iran, which ran August 23-25 at New York’s Openhouse Gallery. As I[.....]

Michael Berryhill’s oil paintings at KANSAS make me uneasy. In trying to decide why, I made a list of the things that remind me of his work. Instead of smoothing these references out into a proper review (as I had initially planned), I present them to the reader as is. I believe that this enumerated strategy will better serve objects that, by their very nature,[.....]