George Herms is one of America’s major practitioners of assemblage art; his is an art that celebrates junk and that views salvaging it as a path to salvation. Rusty old objects are his favorite material. For his recent exhibition entitled “Project X (An Instant Elation),” he created a host of sculptural assemblages from the scraps of daily life and displayed them in the upper gallery, recreating his studio environment.

One of the most distinctive features of his art is its totemic, incantatory nature. The works often invoke devotional spaces, displaying the detritus of urban life as an assembly

The general persuasiveness of post-Modern critiques of Modernism have tended to blind us to the complexities and philosophical richness of Enlightenment thought. Opening up a productive dialogue with Denis Diderot, author of the highly influential 18th-century Encyclopédie; ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Erika Suderburg’s complex curatorial/art project returns us respectfully—if with humor and a critical eye—to the exhaustive archival logic of the Enlightenment.

The project, an ongoing compendium of boxes that negotiate the obsessive categories of the Encyclopédie