Greg Lamarche: Things I Picked Up Along the Way
@ Shooting Gallery, 4/19/08
Greg Lamarche is crazy about the letters of the alphabet. It's a fascination that dates back to his years as a graffiti artist in Boston in the early '80s, where he was known for his tags' super-clean outlines, as well as for Skills, his popular Xeroxed zine of graffiti culture. Since then, he's branched out into collage and commercial design, but all of his work reveals his ongoing obsession with fonts and typography. Lamarche's current show at White Walls features eye-popping patterns of text cut from found paper that sing with raw energy.

Christian Marclay: Stereo
@ Fraenkel Gallery, 5/1/08
Christian Marclay pioneered the turntable as a musical instrument in the late '70s, scratching out experimental sounds with vinyl found in used record shops. He's collaborated with Sonic Youth, John Zorn, and Elliott Sharp and expanded his samplings to include multimedia and visual art. In his current show, he explores the space between sound and vision, turning the material trappings of music-making into art. Two album covers, placed side-by-side, become canvases for nearly identical jazz-inspired acrylics. Duplicate cyanotype images of a cassette with its tape ripped out sit side by side, creating a tangled Rorschach. With each of these elements, Marclay orchestrates a chamber of visual echoes that resonate in stereo.

Sarah Wagner: Nuclear Family
@ Rena Bransten, 5/1/08
Sarah Wagner turns out delicate textile sculptures that resemble tangled roots and vines. Her faux-plant shapes sprout from the gallery's cement floors and plaster walls, creating gardens that grow wild with tulle flowers, organza leaves, and burlap roots. Wagner's work takes inspiration from the biology of the natural world, exploring the increasingly complicated intersection between built society and untamed nature. In her latest installation, Nuclear Family, a group of deer wanders through what looks like the overgrown wasteland of an abandoned suburbia, lost and out of place.

Alex Lucas, Brian Wilmont: Feudal Echo
@ Park Life, 5/9/08
Some may feel that the twin horrors of global warming and terrorism are hurtling humans into a fiery end of days, but painters Alex Lukas and Brian Willmont aren't frightened — they're entranced. With canvases that dive deep into post-apocalyptic landscapes, Lukas and Willmont show viewers what a modern-day dark age might look like. Lukas' subjects include apartment buildings exploding in sprays of flaming orange debris, crumbling bridges, and power lines overgrown with vines, while Willmont dreams up psychedelic universes where brightly colored peasants and foot soldiers mingle with curious flying machines on black battlefields.

Jen Stark, Anna Fidler and Jana Flynn: Portals
@ Johansson Projects, 5/15/08
This trio of artists transforms one-dimensional planes of paper into doorways that lead to strange universes. Armed with an X-Acto knife, Jen Stark carves stacks of multicolor cardstock into sculptures that resemble pinwheels, spiders, and sea anemones. Anna Fidler's collages plunge the viewer into psychedelic-hued landscapes full of shadowy spirit figures and night creatures. And Jana Flynn uses found paper, thread, and tea leaves to create ominous vistas where dark clouds hover over sweeping plains. Who knew that paper had such a secretly thrilling life?

William Wiley: Punball: Only One Earth
@ Electric Works, 5/16/08
Pinball machines have largely been relegated to the scrap yard of nostalgia, but that hasn't stopped William T. Wiley from resurrecting a 1964 game called North Star and giving it a contemporary spin. The original backboard depicts Eskimos and North Pole femme fatales, clad in thigh-skimming fur and perched on icecaps with walruses and polar bears; Wiley, with his flair for maps and surreal cosmologies, repaints the scene as The Eye Scabs Are Melting — a cautionary tale of global warming. Visitors test their pinball wizardry on both the original and the artist's updated version.

Recession: The Alternative Economies of Maximo Gonzalez
@ Queen's Nail Annex, 5/16/08
They say money makes the world go round — and although Maximo Gonzalez might agree, he's got his own cynical take on the spiraling global economy. Playing with ideas of currency and consumption, Gonzalez cuts up devalued third-world money and transforms it into a delicate mural in which giant factories chew up virgin forests and spit out tanks and TVs. Also on display, Gonzalez's El Changarrito project is a traveling exhibition involving a humble pushcart used by Mexican street vendors. The cart works double duty here, selling the work of emerging Bay Area and Latin-American artists at affordable prices, while also offering a wry critique of the current art economy.

David M. Stein: Improbable\Unlikely
@ Eleanor Harwood, 5/16/08
David M. Stein's first solo show of improbable objects should provoke double takes, plus a chuckle or two. In The Unlikely Library, shelves of books line the gallery walls, teasing the viewer with titles like Etymology for the MTV Generation, Utopias That Worked, and May '68 Riots for Dummies. Stein juxtaposes real books with his faux creations, and asks that visitors don white gloves and browse to determine each volume's authenticity. In the center of the gallery lies Semesterville, a miniature city built from architectural models discarded by students of the California College of the Arts. The effect is that of a balsa-wood shantytown of as-yet-unrealized visions.

Art at the Dump: Paul Cesewski
@ SF Recycling, 5/23/08
In another era, Paul Cesewksi might have run off and joined the circus — the latter-day carny tinkers with metal and machine parts to create lo-fi, bike-powered Ferris Wheels and Tilt-a-Whirls that send spectators spinning into Fourth-of-July reveries. Cesewski's interactive sculptures have shown up everywhere from Burning Man to San Francisco's Bike Rodeo; now, fresh off a residency at the San Francisco dump, he's built a whole new set of mechanical amusements scavenged from cast-off wheels and gears. Staged as a full-on carnival midway, they come together to form the magical Carnaval Mécanique.

Adam5100: The Heart vs. the Mind in a Fight to the Finish
@ Rowan Morrison, 5/24/08
The graffiti artist Adam5100 may have started out bombing derelict sections of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but he's brushed-up on his painting and printmaking at CCA and now appears in gallery shows around the Bay Area. But even with art-world cred, he hasn't let go of his tagger name or can. Breaking down photos into as many as 9 layers by color and tone, he carves each into a stencil, lays down the darkest areas of the canvas first, and builds up to the lightest. The blurred and muted lines of his stencil work create photo-realistic snapshots of abandoned buildings and lightless air shafts — turns out, he still focuses on the sadder part of town.