Karl Haendel at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, through December 5 (532 West 26th Street)The Los Angeles-based artist fills the space with intricate graphite drawings, in shaped frames, depicting both humans (engaged in various, partner-yoga-style contortions) and primates (often balancing quizzically atop stacks of Constructivist shapes). Tabletop arrangements flaunt additional drawings of health-and-beauty and self-improvement products (like Rembrandt tooth-whitening strips), along with hand-sketched QR codes that, when activated, lead to inspirational online videos “chronicling physical transformation.” The overall effect is of a delightful too-muchness, of strange links being forged between very disparate things — just what one might expect from an exhibition tongue-twistingly titled “Organic Bedfellow, Feral Othello.”Michael Pybus at Johannes Vogt, through November 14 (526 West 26th, Suite 205)Pybus samples liberally in this show, from the Pop-art canon — appropriated Keith Haring motifs line the walls, defaced with his own signature written over and over again — as well as from celebrity culture and Disney. Working with his designer sister, Joanna, Pybus has created a clothing brand, Nuke Your Granddad, that sells jumpsuits, shoes, and other items all-over-printed with gaudy images of Channing Tatum, among other things. A series of paintings on a facing wall mash up Christopher Wool’s “Untitled (Riot)” with loosely rendered pictures of Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.” Whether or not you like his work, Pybus adds to a conversation between DIS Magazine and the thread of fashion-art practitioners running through MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York.” Sheila Hicks at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, through November 28 (530 West 22nd Street)In her early 80s, the Paris-based artist continues to experiment with textiles. She lets them cascade in a waterfall from the ceiling (“White River (Fleuve Blanc)”, or she binds them into totemic poles casually leaning in a corner (“The Right of Entry”). Thin filaments of linen are stretched into shimmering paintings of a sort, and tufts of deep-blue fiber are pressed onto paper surrounded by smoke languidly wafting through the air. The exhibition is punctuated with tiny fabric works, each with its own distinctive personality. “I Wish I Was A Rug,” one is titled, coyly poking at that tenuous border between fine art and craft. “New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, through March 20, 2016 (11 West 53rd Street)Subtitled “Ocean of Images” — which, a wall label helpfully adds, refers to a little thing known as the Internet — the 30th edition of this photo survey skitters from the digital to the conceptual to the more or less-traditional. Lucas Blalock builds still life compositions and faux landscapes using the most unsavvy of Photoshop tools, whereas DIS puts commercial-grade technologies to a slicker use. David Hartt shoots undramatic documentary-style images of right-wing think tank Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s drab office interior (“Ah, the banality of evil!,” a friend knowingly cackled). But my personal favorite is David Horvitz’s “Mood Disorder,” a work that insinuates itself into the fabric of the internet itself and then documents the strange results. Horvitz photographed himself clutching his head, a clichéd stock image of despair and angst, and then uploaded this shot to the Wikipedia entry for “mood disorders.” It was later borrowed and re-used in a variety of online publications that needed just such an expression of personal malaise; Horvitz’s head ended up gracing stories about everything from ADHD to student loan depression and physician suicide.Jacob Riis at the Museum of the City of New York, through March 20, 2016 (1220 5th Avenue)Move from the cutting edge of contemporary photography to something quite different: these often wrenching social-documentary shots of New York City life at the very tail end of the 19th century. If you can’t visit in person, the institution has an excellent online archive to explore.
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