The artists in this week’s gallery picks explore ephemerality, chaos and reinvention.

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1. Mayme Kratz and Alan Bur Johnson’s works are concerned with permanence and ephemerality, flight and stillness, life and death, as encapsulated by the cellular systems and organic matter of the Arizona desert at Lisa Sette Gallery
2. Christiane Baumgartner’s work often has multiple meanings and relates to war and the environment at Alan Cristea
3. Troika’s “Cartography of Control” explores the roles that systems and serendipity play in contemporary life at Kohn Gallery
4.Pacific Sun derives from security-camera footage, circulated via YouTube, of the chaos inside a cruise ship weathering a storm in the South Pacific: chairs, tables, bottles, cartons, and people careened as the ship lurched. Intrigued by these complex movements, Thomas Demand decided to re-create the video, minus the people, by constructing and animating a life-size paper model at LACMA
5. Under 35: Part III is an exhibition of artists who create work that reinvents more traditional approaches to materials, compositions and concepts, representing an ever changing definition of art and how materials are used at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
6. Patrick Jacobs’ “Come Closer to Me” – from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – features sculpture, printmaking, and a room-sized installation. Jacobs investigates space, scale, and perception of reality, while working across media. Drawing inspiration from nature, historical landscape painting, popular home and garden culture, and the supernatural, he sets up contexts with inherent internal contradictions at Pierogi