Measured in anxious days and weeks, the slow pace of shipping once served as a reminder that commodities, although seemingly self-generated, are nevertheless the products of labor, including that of transportation. However, with the advent of containerization, dockside automation, and networked logistics, the figure of the transportation worker is increasingly supplanted by an algorithm—or worse, by a drone. While these innovations have driven down the cost of shipping, they have also made supply chains more vulnerable to interruption: It was no fluke, for example, that Occupy Oakland

Nick Aguayo’s abstract paintings have a collage-like sensibility, as if created by placing cutout swatches of color on horizontal surfaces. This effect—one that brings to mind Leo Steinberg’s characterization of the flatbed picture plane as “a receptor surface on which objects are scattered”—is heightened by the autonomous nature of each individual form. Departing from the scumbled brushstrokes in some of Aguayo’s earlier paintings, the eight untitled canvases in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects were notable for their shift toward cleanly

Balthazar Korab (1926–2013) thought himself “an architect who makes pictures rather than a photographer who is knowledgeable about architecture.” This exhibition—the first in this gallery, which is devoted to architecture and design—included nearly thirty silver gelatin prints of photos taken between 1959 and 1999. Exemplary in their ability to palpably convey what it means to occupy a building, these images validate Korab’s self-assessment and confirm his position in the firmament of architectural photographers that includes Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Ken Hedrich, Henry Blessing,

Amid the rubble lay a bottle of booze. A toilet was wedged in the wreckage. The pope, perched atop an ash heap, spread his arms in benediction. These were just a few of the chintzy plastic miniatures lodged among the crags and craters of Mathis Altmann’s dozen grapefruit-size assemblages that dangled from the ceiling, over a thick carpet of mulch, in his recent exhibition “Psycho Bombs.” The viewer, once drawn in to scrutinize these ruptured concrete-and-detritus globes, might have looked quizzically upon the seeming incongruity between the whimsical toys and the desolation of their settings.

The tightly wound formalism of “Sexus,” Josh Mannis’s recent solo show at Thomas Solomon Gallery, might at first have seemed to run counter to his cutely pornographic subjects—grinning figures who stroke and fondle one another in parks and on floors. These scenes fill ten nearly square ink-on-paper drawings—eight in black, two in red—that were hung evenly on the gallery’s three white walls. But this buttoned-down hang and Mannis’s conventional medium were both support and stimulation for the works’ lecherous charge. Like Fernando Botero’s paintings of voluminous couples picnicking