JJ PEET at On Stellar Rays, through July 31 (1 Rivington Street)Imagine if Richard Tuttle collaborated with Thomas Hirschhorn and you might have a handle on these amazingly weird wall sculptures, which purport to be still-lifes (or “Stilifes,” PEET’s preferred term). Wood, sheetrock, and construction-based materials are joined by small ceramic objects, slabs of marble, cardboard, and other materials. Scraps of oblique text surface here and there: “Missing,” “Silencer Supressor_”, “FUCKIN FINISH.” News images are appropriated into the works, most of them tending toward the bleakness of state brutality or terrorism, with participants’ faces whited out. In the most straightforwardly narrative of the pieces, a found statuette of a noble couple literally hides from a nearby image of a scrum of masked riot cops.“The Inaugural” at Lyles & King, through July 12 (106 Forsyth Street)This newly launched gallery, co-owned by former Derek Eller director Isaac Lyles and his wife, Alexandra King-Lyles, is sited in a location that previously held a Mexicue restaurant. Needless to say, the pair had their renovations cut out for them, but the end result is an unexpected architectural delight: A flowing line of three rough rooms, the last of which is accessed via a raw wood-beam staircase. Deft curation holds the debut group show together. Davina Semo has brand-new wall sculptures that drape chains over sheets of leather embedded in concrete — the heat produced by the latter, as it dries, discoloring or literally burning the former. Nearby, Michael DeLucia’s “Ghost” plays with a sympathetic palette, in this case achieved by degrading the surface of two sheets of plywood originally an elephantine grey. Two large Borden Capalino works made using a mixed-bag of techniques — thermal transfer, broad swipes of tar, the occasional lamb lung affixed to the surface — flirt with the boundaries between the off-puttingly brutal and the seductive, as if they’re tempting you to get closer only to punch you in the face. The show is rounded out with two charcoal-and-collage paintings depicting a wild field of emojis, by Despina Stokou; text-based works by Mira Schor; a bronze sculpture by Eli Ping that might be how Lucio Fontana or Enrico Castellani would have depicted a Caesarean scar; and a legion of weird, floor-crawling monsters — their bodies simple bodega coffee cups — courtesy of Violet Dennison. Huma Bhaba at Salon 94, through June 28 (243 Bowery and 1 Freeman Alley)At the Freeman’s branch of this two-part show, the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist presents large-scale photographs and collages, all of them untitled, and many of them featuring dogs. Three energetic pups wrestle playfully in one composition, oblivious to what Bhaba has superimposed over their image: photos of glistening, sticky marijuana buds, the sort of ultra-detailed weed-porn that one would find in “High Times.” (Pot finds its way into another, more abstract work, which contrasts the texture of the buds with the craggy face of a rock wall.) At the Bowery space, drawings on paper made using dust and dirt recall David Hammonds’s “Basketball Drawings.” They’re joined by a trio of bronze sculptures, the best of which is made to resemble a monolithic totem hewn from cheap Styrofoam, its surface marred with a raw and toothy spraypainted face.Sadie Laska at CANADA, through July 12 (333 Broome Street) Working with acrylic, oil, and the occasional streak of spraypaint, Laska conjures a personal, romantic, intensely beautiful scene. The show, “I, Clouded,” seems to conflate the self with the cycles of weather patterns. Landscapes are created with abstract fields of color, scribbled figurative elements laid on top: a moon curved like a banana, the spiky heads of what might be tulips. With a pair of works, “Neon France” and “Pie Piece,” the natural world is abandoned in favor of a geometric exercise: uneven triangles, a bold palette. The exhibition’s cheery mood is complicated by a set of four oil-on-wood cut-outs of giant human figures leaning against the wall. Despite their underlying dopiness and a certain anatomical liberty taken by the artist — one man’s crotch appears to be located just below his esophagus — there’s something sinister about the set-up. Consider that pink-painted figure with its arms held aloft: In any other year it might read as a celebratory gesture, but right now it’s hard not to see it as someone being rudely frisked against the wall, or begging an unseen aggressor not to shoot.Brian DeGraw at Allen & Eldridge, through June (55 Delancey Street) This project space in the back of James Fuentes is presenting 10 mixed-media works by this member of the art-world-adjacent band Gang Gang Dance. The best pieces — and they’re all pretty darn good — mingle adept draftsmanship with purposefully naïve figurative elements, as if DeGraw is cheekily proving his chops and undermining them at the same time. Look closely and faces appear in a haze of visual noise: “Blue Reed” contains the ghostly image of the lower half of the late Lou Reed’s mug. Cut-paper letters combine into occasional words — “Etow Oh Koam,” the name of a Mohawk king, or “More Sky” — and DeGraw adeptly links the disparate compositional elements together with a playfulness that nods to Joan Miro.
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