ART+ haiku: If Andres Serrano's Piss Christ isn't your cup of tea, try Sting on a Crucifix at ART+ during a retrospective of fashion icon Francesco Scavullo's work, on display through March 10. The dean of the A-list lensmen, Scavullo's subjects ran the gamut of the jet set glitterati, marking him as one of the definitive archivers of the cult of personality over the past half-century. This tribute to Scavullo, who died in January, features shots of Mick Jagger in silver booty shorts, a heavily made-up Louise Nevelson as Zorro in drag, and a clueless Andy Warhol posing with model Gail Cook. -- CSJ ART+, Village of Merrick Park, 358 San Lorenzo Ave., #3135, Coral Gables. 786-497-1111.
Bang-Bang Bazan: Sergio Bazan fiddles with sound in two dimensions. The exhibit features paintings of revolvers with embedded messages including a gun, a prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, images from sonograms, and references to religion. Sound interesting? The exhibition is titled "Tiempo y Diferencias" ("Time and Differences"). -- CSJ Through February 29 at Diana Lowenstein Fine Art, 3080 SW 38th Ct. 305-774-5969.
Deeply Rooted Distilled Flower Fungus Seedpot Pollen: Jason Hedges's Deeply Rooted Distilled Flower Fungus Seedpot Pollen is a spectacle in between sensorial zones, a performance feast of sight, taste, and smell. At the opening you could sample three different kinds of grappa, and he exhibited a variety of mushroom vitrines, though I felt more attracted to his mushroom prints, which he made from the spores' sweat. Guild & Greyshkul (a New York collective) exhibits video, photo, sculpture, drawing, and painting. Some of my favorites: Valerie Crosswhite's funny Fox Chasing Rabbit, on canvas; the careful and deliberate drawings of Benjamin Degen; and Five of Cups by Anya Kielar, a mortar-and-pestle work pouring black resin on the floor. -- AT Through February 28. Placemaker, 3852 N. Miami Ave. 305-576-6695.
Get Your Kink On: Thais Zumblick's arresting self-portraits seem to straddle Georges Bataille's hinterland between masochistic acceptance and sadistic provocation with deadpan panache. Series 9490.t refers to the color code for purple and maybe for a mixture of black and blue. Also at Kessler: Was it Marx who said, "Man is born barefoot but everywhere he is in a pair of Nikes?" Painter Ramiro Ramirez combines a Flemish economy of space with hyperrealism in his The High Performance Machine is About Athletic Shoes. Just Picture It: sneakers as commodity fetish and Joe and Jane Lunchbox agog in rapture. Or maybe Ramirez just posits that running shoes have become the opium of the masses. -- CSJ Marina Kessler Gallery 2628 NW Second Ave. 305-573-6006.
Visions of a City: Sergio Payares has a figurative but very sparse style -- human limbs and heads, ships, flags, stairs are connected by lines that serve as geometric pointers linking pictograms scattered all over the work's internal space. The lines connecting limbs are structural scaffolding for further pictograms. An example is Ocupando Zona Rica (Occupying a Rich Zone), a commanding canvas that looks like a huge insect walking on dozens of human legs, its fish-filled belly painted in red and its carapace crowned by seven chimneys. Also on view is Unraveling, a collaboration between locals Lynne Golob Gelfman and Eugenio Espinoza. The work stretches the boundaries of each artist's style, without losing authenticity. Gelfman provides the surfaces with her greenish/bluish colors and patterns; Espinoza adds edge, volume, and his material touch of abandon we have come to appreciate. --AT Through February 29 at Casas Riegner Gallery, 25 NE 39th St. 305-573-8242.
Triple Threat: Imagine Carl Sagan in woodshop to wrap your skull around Kerry Ware's ethereal Harmony. The artist drilled "billions and billions" of holes in gallery walls and filled them with a galaxy of pegs to launch the spectator's gaze and thoughts heavenward. Domestic Scenery: Mirna Massengale's gorgeous C-prints and savory puns read like a surreal collision between Tammy Faye Baker and Martha Stewart with a delicate infusion of Miss Manners minimalism tossed in for narrative ballast. Carolina Salazar's Its the Little Things wed isolated moments of intense introspection on a sparse bone armature with meaty conceptual gristle. Definitely painting you can sink your teeth into. -- CSJ Dorsch Gallery, 51 NW 24th St. 305-576-1278.
Urban Recipes: Joshua Levine, Michael Loveland, and Raymond Saa spent nearly a year documenting the Wynwood area, successfully recontextualizing the neighborhood's vernacular narrative. In the main gallery space the artists have covered the walls in luscious, fat, vertical stripes of color, mimicking the palette of working-class homes in the area. Saa's cardboard lattices erupting from the walls in outward rippling waves evoke the hobo jungles of the Depression years and Brazilian favelas. Loveland explores the world of corporate billboards, highway signage, and urban information. In an adjacent room Levine's obsession with surveillance ratchets up Warhol's cliché on fifteen minutes of fame. -- CSJ Through February 28. Rocket Projects, 3440 N. Miami Ave. 305-576-6082.
