With manacled Mormons, oddball accomplices, bondage modeling, and fantasies of celestial unions, Tabloid, the new film by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris, has been said to contain something for everyone.
     A reflection on love and self-delusion, it’s enigmatic and hyperbolic even for Morris’s standards, chronicling the misadventures of beauty queen cum sex vixen, 1970s British tabloid starlet, Joyce McKinney.
     “She’s a real cipher…” Morris muses, as if puzzling over a combinatory algorithm. “A mystery, but a truly romantic sort of mystery.”
     To discuss his new film and its storied femme fatale, I’ve met the director on a hot July afternoon. From his hotel suite in Soho we overlook 180 degrees of Midtown’s shimmering skyline.
     ”[Joyce]’s volatile, and crazy, and smart, and vindictive…I really don’t know what she is, but she’s a great subject for a movie.” He concedes, smiling.
     Joyce McKinney may be a handful. I suppose she’s not the existential conundrum of Abu Ghraib or Iwo Jima (two topics of his past Standard Operating Procedure (2008) and The Fog of War (2003)).
     Morris has always been an expert at locating the mad hatters and outliers in society (be it teenaged assassins, ex military commanders, or pet cemetery proprietors). It might be an inane headline that sets afloat his sail of inspiration.

Esperanza Rosales is a curator. In the traditional sense of collecting and explicating artists’ work under one venue auspice, but also in her own medium, wherein she mounts, rearranges, and deconstructs text on a page. In life we almost accept words as metaphors, but in writing they become even clumsier frameworks.
     “Like the languages that we speak, there will always be slips, inaccuracies, inadequacies, misunderstanding, certain lacks—precisely because they’re invested in ciphering and deciphering, coding and decoding, scripting and unscripting—that veer towards the creation of something new and obscure.”
     These thoughts of Esperanza I can almost feel wafting through her recent exhibition, ‘Nobody Can Tell the Why of It,’ an assimilation of film, drawing, even endless steps. Accidentally (or not) pinpointing a link in Esperanza’s own “scrapbook” process, the show’s title itself is a wink at intertextuality. Presenting works by Nicholas Byrne, Timothy Furey, Ken Okiishi, Nick Mauss, and Josef Strau, ‘Nobody Can Tell the Why of It’ incorporates ideas of mysticism and male hysteria. Not for the faint of heart, but I think I’ll keep this one bookmarked.

Artist Daniel Arsham and architecture collaborative Snarkitecture, comprised of Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen, whose creative practices are responsible for groundbreaking transformations in Richard Chai and Christian Dior interiors, Merce Cunningham sets, and Emmanuel Perrotin gallery spaces, now turn their attention to Storefront, March 1-April 23, for an unprecedented archaeological quarry delving deep into untapped streams of process and form. Picture a NASA mission spelunking through Hoth. The backdrop might resemble Dig.
     Exploring a discourse of precision and looseness, Dig unfolds in 3 segments, the final in which Snarkitecture create and inhabit the exhibition. From March 29-April 4 Storefront will be transformed into a deep façade filled with EPS industrial foam. From April 5-23 the public will be invited to view Arsham removing pieces from solid white infill, carving tunnels, crevices, and peepholes. In this final stage, Dig will become accessible to the public through rotating doors acting as windows on the site’s exterior, and by appointment through navigable passages that Arsham has excavated. On April 23 the public will be able to enter Storefront for the closing reception at 7pm.

Splice, cut, burn, sharpen, dismember, Doppelgänger: Images of the Human Being, a new book from Gestalten, asks the question: just how do we mask or reveal our inner selves? Exploring current trends in physical abstraction, each of its seven chapters — Embody, Dissolve, Appeal, Reshape, Perform, Deform, and Escape — signifies a different approach to the technical manipulation we exact on our corporeal façades. Invoking Dada, Surrealism, high fashion, and industrial design aesthetics, Doppelgänger taps into our creative potential and art’s transformative agency (certainly apropos classical conventions). A host of contemporary artists show how digital media has shattered allegiances to da Vinci’s ideal proportions and equipped us with truly radical modes of expression, erasing or positing archetypes we never imagined.
     Highly stylized, Doppelgänger: Images of the Human Being is nevertheless earnest in conveying ironies inextricable to the human experience. We are chameleon creatures, ever morphing and reaching deep into ancient folklore to find our “true” identities. As Phyllis Galembo depicts natives in ritual (Ngar Ball Traditional Masquerade Dance, Cross River, Nigeria, 2004), other artists frame humans in the phantasmagorical and slightly grotesque (e.g. Madame Peripeti’s Pughatory series).

Forget space travel, time capsules. Past, present, and future are but alter egos video artist Mariko Mori (森万里子, b. 1967 in Tokyo, Japan) embodies in the glow of a moon-age daydream. Now showing through August 1, Kumano (1997-98) celebrates the Asia Society’s recent acquisition of a pivotal work in the artist’s oeuvre. Affirming her knack for re-invention and media overlay, Kumano witnesses Mori’s quirky jumble of the temporal continuum in fairy, shaman, and angel incarnations. As the exhibition flows from traditional layout to meditative chamber and theater, Mori’s own spiritual journey (no whimsical diversion but a twelve-hour trek) to the revered 8th century pilgrimage site is illuminated. An ancient stone statue, 18th-century golden Tibetan icon and Japanese silk scroll are among the treasures she cycles through with shimmering, looping vocals, as if to reference the non-linear arc of Shintoism and mutability of adopted religions. Once having described her aim to “connect [ancient things] with contemporary life through the technology we have now”, Mori implements aural layering and digital imaging to splice epochs of Asian belief systems.

Though hardly a stranger in photography circles, Rosalind Solomon is gradually gaining prominence in the mainstream. After four decades trekking Japan, Guatemala, Peru, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Poland with a medium format point and shoot, the veteran photographer and recent octogenarian is being celebrated in New York in multiple ways. Her single-artist exhibition, RITUAL (now on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery through June), and the MoMA’s Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (taking place nearly twenty-five years after her first Ritual show at the MoMA) feature the artist in bold documentary form. Reflecting an ongoing theme in her work, RITUAL documents private meditation and communal rites binding people of various cultures. A humanist to the core, Solomon captures expressions sharpening the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.
     Known for her window-into-the-world immediacy rendered via the use of square format and strobe lighting, Solomon’s work has often been likened to that of Diane Arbus (with both women’s penchant for deviant subject matter only augmenting the comparison — the former favoring battered baby dolls, the latter, society’s castoffs).

If you’re searching for metaphysical rejuvenation, Jules de Balincourt mixes a potent visual tonic of apocalyptic sunbursts and fractured fortunetellers. Continuing his international successes in Paris, London, and Tokyo, the lithe 37-year-old graced Deitch’s cool gallery interiors last month with sixteen figurative and abstract paintings, marking his most extensive exhibition to date. Despite de Balincourt’s politically tinged oeuvre, his recent works have been decidedly more meditative, measuring the imprint of technology in a process of thoughtful internalization. Dense iterations of life, chaos, and computers, de Balincourt’s art presents content and form in a deliberate DIY, faux-naïf aesthetic. Oil and acrylic media, stencils, tape, knives, and spray paint are employed in equal measure.
     Besides a penchant for lush settings and a Day-Glo palette, de Balincourt’s psychedelic-cum-futuristic art reveals his mélange of influences. Incorporating a French pedigree and California culture, it appears richly idiosyncratic (think a hallucinogenic hike through the Barbizon woods). Part humanitarian, part provocative, De Balincourt’s creative output could be seen to reflect his extracurricular activities, including the temporarily defunct Starr Space (a Brooklyn hub for yoga and gallery denizens alike) and Bush-era protests.

From embattled warriors to writhing sea creatures, ukiyo-e aficionados and comic book collectors will find their niche in the fearsome and fantastic, now on display at the Japan Society through June 13. Showcasing exquisitely detailed woodblock prints by the godfather of modern video games and anime, Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), from the Arthur R. Miller Collection,” is a not-to-be-missed exhibition organized by Timothy Clark, head of the Japanese section of the British Museum. An action-packed show grouped in warrior, landscape, kabuki, beautiful women, and kyoga (literally “crazy pictures”) categories, the 130-print pictorama includes gems from the collection of NYU legal scholar Arthur R. Miller, rough sketches unearthed from the Victoria and Albert Museum and even onsite drawing by the mangaka-in-residence Hiroki Otsuka. Moved by the master printmaker, Otsuka will create a full-length comic strip as an interactive “meta-narrative” for exhibition goers.
     Having created roughly 10,000 prints, Kuniyoshi can be viewed a powerful Pop Art progenitor who worked to satisfy the insatiable appetite of Edo period manga fan equivalents (at a rate of two soba platefuls per print, scholars estimate). But apart from his staggering output, the artist is celebrated for his spirited defiance and slew of creative tangents despite his censorial 1840s Tokugawa shogunate.

An exercise in Biennial belt tightening, the Whitney’s “2010” isn’t quite the visual juggernaut of years past. Pared down to fifty-five artists seeking to convey the anxiety and hope of the last two years, the exhibition is an understated paean to the present. On the modest roster is Vietnamese-born Tam Tran, a 23-year-old photographer whose contribution to a Memphis group exhibition first caught the eye of associate curator Carrion-Murayari. Tran, whose use of stark color and shadow recalls William Eggleston’s saturated depictions of the region, is quirky and disarming in her spontaneity and collaborative approach. In photographing her nephew for the Raising Hell series chosen for the show, the artist remarked, “If I see something I liked I would yell, ‘HOLD!’ and immediately push the shutter button before the moment was gone.” Often her work involves costuming or formal manipulation to emphasize ambiguous roles and narratives. Pool halls, mini marts, backyards, and her body act as canvases for studies in shifting identity and dichotomy. In a self-portrait cycle, for example, the artist transmogrifies from diminutive doll to powerful protagonist. While throughout Raising Hell the artist’s nephew wields a stick against a palpable yet invisible foe in alternating poses of victory and surrender. Rich in metaphorical content, the photograph Battle Cry from this series appeared prominently in media outlets covering the Biennial. “From the stance of an adult, the boy warrior is living out an instance of our childhood that we’ve lost,” Tran comments. It is a layered perspective on innocence, articulating fear and reassurance, force and restraint.

As global consumers we have become accustomed to beauty with exotic trimmings. For French VOGUE and i-D photographer Viviane Sassen, however, fashion trends are not to be confused with a deeper heartfelt mode of expression. Now on view at Danziger Projects through Apr 10 are selections from her three series ‘Die Son Sien Alles’ (The Sun Sees Everything), ‘Flamboya’, and ‘Ultra Violet’. Not quite haute couture, not quite documentary, Sassen’s photographs are the result of directed African pilgrimages and fall into an enigmatic category incorporating personal memory, imperialism, and sensual beauty. Evoking South Africa, Zambia and East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), they intimate the mythologized ‘Other’ but moreover signify the fruits of close collaborative efforts. African models bathed in shadows or fog, configured in abstract sculptural formations, or marked with strident color, dually invoke indigenous spirituality and colonial superstition. In Sassen’s world of magical realism, bodies overlap or emerge in lush, unusual settings, intertwining the oft-illusory politics of ethnicity and aesthetics.

The artist discussed her work and ties to Africa in a candid interview with PLANET