Examining culture and custom in this week’s choice gallery picks.

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1. With a nod towards environmental issues and man’s permanent interference with nature, Lucy McLauchlan’s latest work is reminiscent of her engagement with the local community, uncovering moments where the two worlds collide and escaping walls of concrete and steel at Lazarides Rathbone
2. In the past, Lisa Kokin has incorporated readable text or text translated into form in her art. In her new work, she has substituted text for fragments of stripped-down zippers with (in her own words) “their attendant metaphors of concealment, closure and impenetrability.” at Seager/Gray Gallery
3. Charlie Smith explores Making/Unmaking at GRIN
4. Both delicate and fearsome, the traditional Chinese dragon kite embodies a mythical symbol of power. Ai Weiwei unfurls a spectacular contemporary version of this age-old art form at Alcatraz
5. Anna Fidler’s paintings celebrate the euphoric, rebellious and mythical while consciously contemplating the transformational qualities of ritual and landscape at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art
6. Jamex de la Torre states, “‘Folkloric’ refers to our interest in the Mexican vernacular; ‘acid’ represents our contemporary reinterpretations and utilization of new material technologies. In this body of work, we have explored tendencies to revisit our 60s and 70s flower child art roots with free-flowing images of beautiful and strange nature at Mindy Soloman Gallery