“THIS GRAFFITI-ARTIST-TURNED-CHEF Is Lighting Up the Paris Restaurant Scene,” reads a typical gastronomical write-up today. Whether cooking on a remote Swedish mountain or in a laboratory-like kitchen, the contemporary master chef prefers to be portrayed as an artist. And perhaps even more than an old-fashioned Michelin star, a massive tome from a major art publisher seems to be a mandatory requirement. Yet if the dialogue between food and art is livelier than ever, last year’s mammoth survey “Arts and Foods—Rituals Since 1851” at the Milan Triennale made it abundantly clear that the

Manic humor pervades David Snyder’s immersive installations. In his previous solo exhibitions at Michael Benevento, Snyder altered the gallery’s architecture to create eerie, fun-house-like settings. In “Face Forward,” 2011, the viewer walked through a passage of wall-size, face-like facades, each paired with a distinctive, disembodied voice—imbuing the gallery space with a schizo character. In “Ectoplasms,” 2013, a false ceiling in one corner of the gallery would suddenly shake, triggered by a motion sensor when one approached the paintings hung below it. Portrait of Nugose, 2013, an

The viewer’s initial impression of Amy Yao’s “Bay of Smokes,” primarily installed in Various Small Fires’s sun-drenched main gallery (carpeted in a cream hue for the occasion), was one of blinding white light. This was not to last. Once one’s eyes adjusted, one noticed ready-made and crafted objects of various hues, each vaguely befouled or compromised, positioned on the tufted carpet and installed on the gallery walls. Brightly colored plastic flowers, crammed into a drywall recess, were trapped behind Plexiglas; a vacuum fixture encrusted with resin and activated charcoal (the sort used in

To announce his first show at Reserve Ames, a Craftsman-style house-cum-gallery, David Muenzer offered a 2016 photograph reminiscent of James Welling’s early phyllo-dough abstractions, in which ambiguous forms take on a heightened significance against a neutral ground. Scattered like pick-up sticks, the neon-yellow penile forms are in fact the innards of felt-tip highlighters, the material from which “Scalar-Daemon” takes its theme. The gallery’s only show thus far to confine itself to an outbuilding (all others have spread into the residence’s bathroom, laundry room, or living spaces), Muenzer’s