Miami Citizen: Don't bother trying to find common threads among these nine featured artists from different backgrounds. The show is more about the encounters their networks elicit than their stylistic convergences. I particularly enjoyed Kevin Arrow's delicate ink drawings on paper (borrowed from disparate sources), Mauricio Gonzalez's otherworldly landscapes (these are better than others I've seen with too much paint matter in them), Eugenia Vargas's evocative photos, Pedro Vizcaino's gun-morphing, and Teresa Ortiz's precious, circuslike representations of feline acrobatics. -- Alfredo Triff Through December 15. The Mexican Cultural Institute, 5975 Sunset Dr., South Miami; 786-268-4909.
Keepsake: Working with ordinary objects, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova seduces the viewer into places that are at once eerily familiar yet ineluctably foreign. He has a disconcerting way of revealing the hidden splendor of the mundane, playing deftly with nostalgia and identity, elaborating conceptual memories that bespeak a culture of reinvention, of banal planes of reflection. Home (2004), an architectural rendering of his parents' zero-lot-line house in suburban Kendall, is a clever example of Rodriguez-Casanova's approach to explorations of self, a kind of backyard archaeologist. This solo show provides the Cuban-born, Miami-based artist a breakout opportunity on the tail of his recent group shows at the Annina Nosei and White Box galleries in New York, and at the Miami Art Museum. -- Carlos Suarez de Jesus Through January 3. Leonard Tachmes Gallery, 817 NE 125th St., North Miami; 305-895-1030.
