The underscore in the title of Peggy Ahwesh’s exhibition “Heart_Land” subtly but unequivocally highlighted the ever-expanding rift between middle America and the rest of the United States, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s malignant leadership. Each of the four video installations in this concise and generative show at Joan examined the vagaries and possibilities of place via remarkable, if often unfairly overlooked, parts of the country: Atlantic City, New Jersey; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and Topeka, Kansas. Ahwesh and Linda Norden, the show’s curator, reframed this group of older pieces by placing

For her first solo show at Kohn Gallery, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent hung eight of her oversize acrylic paintings around the venue’s main and commensurately scaled space. The thin unstretched canvases, anchored to the wall by their top edges, suggested an affinity with banners or tapestries, pliant and portable heralds even though their compositions were long since fixed. She describes her signature black grounds as being “unde-finable, unlocatable.” In their materialization of absence, these amorphous settings function as foils for the emergent hard-edge shapes that manifest within them

“The Ghost in Me”—the title of Bri Williams’s first solo show in Los Angeles—could easily be read as a self-descriptive statement written by the sculptures themselves, almost all of which contained spectral and slowly decomposing objects trapped inside shells made of hard soap. Expanding on her use of this material as a sculptural medium, Williams created these works by placing found items with personal significance—such as a crucifix; Mardi Gras masks; and an antique sign featuring Reddy Kilowatt, the former mascot for US electric companies—into molds that get filled with cut-up and molten bars