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. -- Carlos Suarez De Jesus Through February 28. Rocket Projects, 3440 N. Miami Ave. 305-576-6082.
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. --Alfredo Triff Through February 29 at Casas Riegner Gallery, 25 NE 39th St. 305-573-8242.
