Among the highlights of John Williams’s rockin’, twirlin’, multimedia debut solo show at Dan Bernier in Los Angeles in 1999 were hip versions of the magic lantern: harlequin-patterned combines of variegated gels and supports, placed on old phonograph albums rotating on turntables, projecting flickering patterns of light, like raucous butterflies, across the gallery, with wonky sounds wailing as the needle dropped. Aiming for sonic and visual overload, Williams would spin a number of his “records” simultaneously on different levels of his jerry-built “amp” stacks. A first glance at Sister’s white

Fortunately, art history is written as much, if not more, by artists as by historians, in part because artists are not beholden to fact. To come to terms with the jubilant work in Samara Caughey’s debut solo show—five freestanding sculptures and three wall-hung pieces—a familiarity with the basic discourse of twentieth-century sculpture in the ever-expanding expanded field would be useful, but liberal doses of Emersonian whim, intuitive conjecture, and, hey, fun should aid the fieldwork.

Certainly Eva Hesse is an important historical inspiration for Caughey, but so too are the less-sanctioned,

To point a camera at a house is a somewhat tautological operation, as both comprise rooms—the term camera denotes an enclosed, interior space—with windows, or apertures, opening out. Among all fabricated things, the house is the camera’s closest kin and shares its most salient associations; above all, to the psyche, whether perceiving, remembering, imagining, dreaming. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard famously described “the chief benefit of the house” in relation to this last function: “the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

In Amir Zaki’s recent work

There’s a moment in every thriller when the protagonists realize they’ve entered a bad situation, having stumbled on an illicit drug factory, a mad dictator’s WMD program, or a mother alien’s nest full of eggs. In this exhibition, Pauline Stella Sanchez conjured the anxiety of such moments with all the craft of Martha Stewart.

The center of Sanchez’s show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery was a series of seven small wood-and-vinyl structures that resembled a display of architectural models. Each was drenched in sky blue paint, mounted on a turntable, and perched atop a pedestal. Collectively titled Gone