We’re examining structures in life and art with this week’s gallery picks.

*            *            *

1. Using a wide range of materials, Joanne Greenbaum infuses her paintings with elements of drawing. Examining both form and narrative, Greenbaum perpetually changes, adds, or negates her own actions, simultaneously celebrating and questioning the act of painting.  Upstairs, the sculptures reveal  the artists strong affiliation with form as a structure for further mark making at Rachel Uffner Gallery
2. The exhibition Ellen Lesperance, Helen Mirra, Traversing features new paintings and a recent interactive project by Lesperance, and an international, intergenerational weaving project* organized by Mirra at Armory Arts
3. Yoshiaki Mochizuki has created a dozen new paintings on wood panels featuring his signature use of layered gesso, burnishing clay, ink, pigments and precious metal leafing. These materials are each subjected to various treatments including sanding, polishing and manual distressing. Finally, the surfaces are scored with a needle resulting in highly detailed, tightly wrought patterning, and a dynamic excavation of these underlying layers at Marlborough Chelsea
4. Utilizing salvaged materials from recently closed Chicago Public Schools, Preus has constructed functional sculptural works which revel in the histories embedded in their component parts. Whether these histories are implied, or as literal as a student’s writing on an old desk, Preus’s process of transforming old to new is both cathartic and political. These objects hold our collective memories at Rena Bransten Gallery
5. Excerpts from the Natural World, features artists who use nature in imaginative ways as source material. Mari Andrews and Esther Traugot combine natural and fabricated objects to create delicate sculptures and installations, and Sarah Hinckley combines images from landscapes to create meditative drawings and paintings at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary
6. Interested in opening up a broader context in which art could be experienced, Alan Shields created objects that hang freely in space and are experienced in relation to the movement of the human body. His brightly colored, layered works illustrate Shields’s belief in a direct connection between art and life, revealing a multifaceted practice that merges the sculptural, the painterly, and the theatrical at Aspen Art Museum