American Artist
Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn
On view through April 13, 2025

In the new video and sculpture installation “Shaper of God” by American Artist, which is staged on a low platform in the cavernous space of Pioneer Works, the past, the present, and the fictional are layered for an effect of both simultaneity and continuity. Geography is one point of connection between Artist and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, who both grew up in the nearby California communities of Altadena and Pasadena, respectively, a half-century apart. The show’s title is taken from the religious text written by Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of Butler’s novel Parable of a Sower, 1993, whose post-apocalyptic setting seems especially prescient in light of last month’s devastating fires. (Artist’s exploration likewise feels especially well-timed, though it is the culmination of years of work.)

After leaving the fortified city of Robledo, Olamina creates a new community named Acorn. Here, To Acorn (1984), 2022, is a sculpture depicting an old bus sign similar to one that Butler would have stood under in her youth—an instance of Artist blending Butler’s biography with fictional elements from Sower. A trio of videos, playing on a large screen on the gallery’s back wall, showcases people, places, and events from the book. The first is a ’90s-style documentary about the Arroyo Seco parkland in Los Angeles. The second is a politically scattered presidential campaign video for Christopher Donner, the leading candidate in the novel. And the third is a fictional news segment about an astronaut who dies in the story, an event that serves as an entry point for a discussion of the meaning of space exploration. The surreality of combining the fictional with the real is very affecting and in one case—when the language in the Donner video is taken from the rapper Ye’s failed presidential campaign—it exposes the absurdity of our reality.

The subject is approached again in a two-channel video, The Monophobic Response, 2024, in which a group of artists, engineers, and scholars, acting as “Earthseeders”—followers of Olamina’s religion—reenact a rocket engine test. The rocket in Butler’s time was still a metaphor for human possibility. Now, billionaires sell the idea of space exploration as a distraction from climate change. Its symbolic resonance has shifted. Science fiction often looks forward by asking: What happens if this goes on? The cost of the present is what seems to be missing from “Shaper of God”—except in one installation.

Estella Butler’s Apple Valley Autonomy, 2024, recreates, with the aid of A.I. imaging software, a chicken coop owned by Butler’s grandmother, which burned down with her ranch in Butler’s youth. The coop houses reproduced selections from Butler’s archive, neatly arranged in flip-top boxes. It’s uncomfortably prophetic to see Butler’s life fed into the kind of machine that she would have warned against.—Zito Madu

Camille Henrot
Hauser & Wirth | 542 West 22nd Street
On view through April 12, 2025

At 24 feet tall, the sheer scale of the largest bronze sculpture in the gallery makes you feel small. Camille Henrot has positioned 347 / 743 (Abacus), 2024, to catch your gaze upon entering—a reminder of how the world looks through a child’s eyes. With its willowy rods suggesting wetland grasses as much as tabletop bead mazes, the work is one of three large-scale pieces that echo nature’s unruly forms in the busy environmental installation of the artist’s Hauser & Wirth debut, “A Number of Things.” The various discrete sculptures on view are greater than the sum of their parts thanks to the intervention of a custom green rubber floor. Together, the objects conjure a deconstructed jungle gym at a playground, and, as at any park, there’s a posse of dogs. Toying with our pareidolia, Henrot asks: What’s the most minimal gesture she can make to recognizably represent dog? Each texture she deploys is exquisitely intentional, the artist’s command of her materials—from concrete to rope—revealing not only an instinct for absurdity, but also the poetry possible in post-structuralism. Throughout, the show conveys elegant restraint in its sense of humor and style.

It actually nagged at me if the show was too tasteful. But the more time I spent in the space, especially with her Dos and Don’ts series, initiated in 2021—wall-based mixed-media works that show the artist’s hand and heart most plainly—it became clear that this tension is deliberate. Taste is one of Henrot’s subjects—as are etiquette, class, the nuclear family, the logics of taxonomy, imagination, identity, and the affinities between the development of the artist and child. Since Grosse Fatigue, 2013, Henrot’s breakthrough video, which juxtaposed browser windows and natural history specimens in drawers, she’s continued to examine the edges of conscious experience and the slippages of semiotic systems. She presents her inquiries with great legibility, but she also knows the other ways we want art to feed us. There’s sensory as well as intellectual pleasure to be found in her playful objects, and a thrill in seeing how her practice grows, always finding more latitude to dig into the murky undercurrents of meaning-making.—Whitney Mallett

An-My Lê
Marian Goodman Gallery | 385 Broadway
On view through February 22, 2025

The Malmstrom Air Force Base occupies a sprawling 3,728 acres of shortgrass prairie in central Montana. And it supports the operations of something much larger—a missile complex that stretches across 23,500 square miles, always standing ready for nuclear war. In “Dark Star / Grey Wolf,” An-My Lê’s exhibition on the ground floor of Marian Goodman Gallery’s new Tribeca headquarters, the artist, for her show’s centerpiece, presents seven aerial views of the area around the base. Installed on a concave wall to form a partial cyclorama, Grey Wolf, 2024—its title perhaps borrowed from the military aircraft of the same name—shows what appear to be launch facilities. Under a bright sky, we see service roads, fenced areas, and mysterious circles etched in the ground, punctuating vast, windswept expanses of the American West.

Since the ’90s, Lê has made a profoundly affecting and conceptually exquisite body of work dealing with war. She is not concerned primarily with the topographical scarring and environmental destruction of battle, though such lasting devastation haunts the scenes she captured in a series made during her return to Vietnam after two decades (her family fled Saigon in 1975, when she was 15). Rather, she explores the myth-making tropes and mediatization of war by capturing reenactments and rehearsals, and by showing the astonishing scale of the military’s peacetime footprint.

If the particulars of Grey Wolf make Lê’s bird’s-eye view photos uncommonly ominous, the images are nevertheless familiar: We live in the era of the drone, where the instruments of surveillance, killing, and the cinematic sublime are collapsed into one. More novel, and differently chilling, are the works in the artist’s complementary series "Dark Star," 2024. Installed in a dim gallery, the pictures show the night sky in awesome, long-exposure detail. The artist shot them from the ground in Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, using advanced star tracking technology. The majestic images are exhilarating, even comforting, reminders of human insignificance, but, with Lê behind the lens, they also suggest the epochal violence of a new colonial frontier. In this impressive show by the great landscape photographer, dread is the unshakeable companion of wonder once again.—Johanna Fateman