“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut in the introduction to Mother Night (1961). “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” In her latest exhibition of works at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Berliner Lucie Stahl showed us bullets pretending to be bears, boys soldiers, and fascists patriots. To supply a setting for these props and characters, Stahl pitched two rectangular tents with the markings of ammo boxes in the middle of the gallery, each titled after the bullet brand name emblazoned on its sides: American Eagle and Brown

New York–based artist Rey Akdogan recently described her practice as motivated by a fundamental interest in “motion, our everyday lives, and how we move through space.” Although these concerns were not immediately evident in her latest solo show at Hannah Hoffman, the more time one spent immersed in the exhibition, the more conscious one became of the dynamic relationships between one’s own moving body, the installed objects, and the surrounding architecture of the rooms. The experience was an intensely phenomenological one, as mundane objects that would have normally remained hidden in plain

In a 1982 essay on the work of Dan Graham, Jeff Wall offered a resoundingly downbeat assessment of the shifting relationship between artists and the city. For recent artists, he argued, the metropolis was no longer a source of inspiration or aesthetic advancement—instead, “the key revelation of the city was in the shock of an absolute loss of hope.” Tellingly, these words were written at the start of the Reagan era, when the old urban order was collapsing, and blighted, postindustrial cities were being remade into commercial centers, shiny simulacra of urban experience. This same transformation