1. Cildo Meireles is open at Galerie Lelong until June 27, 2015.
The centerpiece of Brazialian Cildo Meireles’s presentation at Galerie Lelong will be Amerikkka (1991/2013), the work’s first presentation in the United States. Transforming the gallery into a powerful, interactive experience, the work places viewers under a free-standing ceiling angled at forty-five degrees that is composed of 40,000 hollow golden bullets set against an intense blue background. Viewers stand upon a base of over 20,000 white wooden eggs set into a red floor. Juxtaposing sharp bullets and fragile eggs, Amerikkka simultaneously creates an uncertain and unsettled environment and calls into question whether the work is opening or closing, and if the threat of the bullets is real or perceived. The triple “K” in the title alludes to the Ku Klux Klan, the far right organization that espouses white supremacy and the use of extreme violence. Like Amerikkka, Virtual Spaces (1967-68/2014), one of Meireles’s seminal works, is dependent upon participation and movement by the viewer. This work, in which Meireles looks to Euclidean geometry, is a corner within a corner, an installation trompe l’œil, that highlights the question of that which is virtual versus what is real.
2. Pierre Huyghe is open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until November 1, 2015.
This spring Paris-born Pierre Huyghe has installed the third in a new series of site-specific commissions for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Huyghe has spent the past twenty-five years experimenting across media to create ritualistic, engaging encounters with art. His practice extends beyond the use of traditional art forms like drawing and film to materials uncommon in a fine-arts context, including living animals, plants, and other natural elements. At the Met, his project explores the transformation of cultural and biological systems through a dynamic gathering of components derived from the Museum’s collection, architecture, and surroundings.
3. Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960 – 1971 is open at MOMA until September 7, 2015.
The Museum of Modern Art presents its first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the work of Yoko Ono, taking as its point of departure the artist’s unofficial MoMA debut in late 1971. At that time, Ono advertised her “one woman show,” titled Museum of Modern [F]art. However, when visitors arrived at the Museum there was little evidence of her work. According to a sign outside the entrance, Ono had released flies on the Museum grounds, and the public was invited to track them as they dispersed across the city. Now, over 40 years later, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 surveys the decisive decade that led up to Ono’s unauthorized exhibition at MoMA, bringing together approximately 125 of her early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials. A number of works invite interaction, including Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961) and Ono’s groundbreaking performance, Bag Piece (1964). The exhibition draws upon the 2008 acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, which added approximately 100 of Ono’s artworks and related ephemera to the Museum’s holdings.
4. Daniel Rozin: Descent With Modification is open at Bitforms until July 1, 2015.
“Descent With Modification” marks his first display of interactive sculpture at the Lower East Side location, and his seventh solo exhibition at bitforms gallery, since 2002. Merging the geometric with the participatory, Rozin’s installations have long been celebrated for their kinetic and interactive properties. Grounded in gestures of the body, the mirror is a central theme of Rozin’s practice. In his art, surface transformation becomes a means to explore animated behavior, representation, and illusion. The exhibition features six installations that are shaped by Darwin’s breakthrough writings on evolutionary biology, particularly “On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” from 1859. Marked by a new visual emphasis on the mechanism of descent with modification, Rozin’s works are algorithmically based on the randomness of genetic drift. The pieces also use humor as they synthesize notions of the wild with image complexity, pattern, and dynamic behavior. As a group, they further Rozin’s longstanding investigation of modernist principles, and probe the terrain of artificial life. Central to the exhibit are four software art installations that Rozin developed over a period of five years. In these works, programmed “evolutionary pressure” pushes the artworks to resemble the viewer’s mirrored image. Engaging the viewer with interactive response, each piece positions the site of the audience differently, and varies the formal properties of line, luminosity, and tempo, as screen-based pictures are built improvisationally. 
