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"Once again, our staff has set out around our Chelsea offices, tasked with reviewing what they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. Here is what we came up with this week (to see our One-Line Reviews in illustrated slide show format, click here):* Christopher Astley, \u201CMayhap,\u201D at Leo Koenig, Inc., 541 West 23rd Street, May 24-June 30At first glance, Astley\u2019s installation looks like the results of a child\u2019s temper tantrum, but on closer inspection the scattered soft blocks and stacked towers turn into heavy (literally) meditations on both visual abstraction and creative innocence. \u2014&amp;nbsp;Kyle Chayka &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;*&amp;nbsp;Gusmano Cesaretti, \u201CEast L.A. Diary,\u201D at Anna Kustera Gallery, 520 West 21 Street, June 14-July 13Glad as I am to see at least one shot of a chrome chain steering wheel, it\u2019s even better that the rugged glam, tattoos, guns, and gang symbols captured by Cesaretti while mingling among young Chicanos in 1970s L.A. can manage to be charming, seductive, and fun without also being corny or rude. \u2014 Reid Singer* \u201CContext Message,\u201D at Zach Feuer, 548 West 22nd Street, June 21-August 3 &amp;nbsp;If you don't think too hard about what the actual premise of this show exploring so-called  networked painting  means, then this hot mess of random-yet-intriguing objects is quite enjoyable, featuring, as it does, atavistic abstract paintings, needlepoint Shakespeare quotes, resin sculpture, a snarky oil-painting of an Artforum review, Joseph Cornell-esque boxes filled with shitake mushrooms, pointillist paintings that bark like a dog, a scroll suspended by a helium balloon, and rustic American quilts.&amp;nbsp;\u2014 Chloe Wyma*&amp;nbsp;Awol Erizku, at Hasted Kraeutler, 537 West 24th Street, June 14-July 20Twenty-four-year-old Ethiopian-born Cooper Union graduate Awol Erizku\u2019s large, serene photographs insert members of New York\u2019s young black creative elite \u2014 like Street Etiquette style blogger Joshua Kissi \u2014&amp;nbsp;into masterpiece-inspired portraits (\u00E0 la \u201CGirl With a Pearl Earring\u201D), and the results surprisingly defy clich\u00E9. &amp;nbsp;\u2014 Ashton Cooper* \u201CFake Empire,\u201D curated by Lee Stoetzel, at Mixed Greens, 531 West 26th Street, June 8-July 6This summer show on the theme of architecture and its contemporary mutations gets its punch from two ingenious video pieces that effectively serve as bookends: Rob Carter\u2019s Terry Gilliam-esque stop-motion video of paper cathedrals building themselves out of thin air, which provides an accent of delight, and Olivo Barbieri\u2019s 12-minute video montage featuring sweeping, distorted aerial views of Las Vegas\u2019s flamboyant monuments, which provides a base note of detached contemporary alienation. \u2014&amp;nbsp;Ben Davis*&amp;nbsp;\u201CGreat Photographs: Scape,\u201D at Hasted Kraeutler, 537 West 24th Street, June 14-July 20&amp;nbsp;As urban dwellers, we New Yorkers often forget the vast expanses of earth beyond our little island, and this group show surveying almost a century and a half of landscape photography confronts the beauty, and destructive power, of both the natural world and the industrial innovations in an attempt to conquer our surroundings. \u2014 Shane Ferro*&amp;nbsp;\u201CClaes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen: Theater and Installation 1985-1990, \u2018Il Corso del Coltello\u2019 and \u2018The European Desktop,\u2019\u201D at Pace Gallery, 545 West 22nd Street, April 27-June 29Painted black walls illuminated by the projections of now-historic performances and larger-than-life, playfully colorful prop sculptures of everyday objects help transform the space into what feels, fittingly, more like the set of a stage show than a gallery exhibition. \u2014 Alanna Martinez* Tomas Saraceno, \u201CAir-Port-City / Cloud Cities,\u201D at Tanya Bonakdar, 521 W 21st Street, June 2-July 7Set against a wall-size photograph of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's&amp;nbsp;rooftop installation, Tomas Saraceno's polygonal, interconnecting pods feel like an awkward advertisement for his other sculpture exhibition uptown \u2014 that is, until you walk into the back room, where a Plexiglas panel filled with mutating bubbles and a massive, color-shifting pneumatic sphere remind you that the Argentine engineer-artist's best structures aren't simply art we're supposed to live with, but art that's alive. \u2014 Julia Halperin*&amp;nbsp;Joanna M. Wezyk,  Night and Day,  at Tina Kim, 545 West 25th Street, 3rd Floor, June 7-July 13The Polish painter's new series of small-ish portraits of her children and other relatives, allegedly inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00E9ry's  The Little Prince,  speaks of nostalgia for the uninhibited inner worlds of childhood, though the show's most affecting piece isn't the most whimsical (which co-stars fuzzy, Gizmo-like creatures), but an off-kilter reflection of her son Mike in a darkened computer screen. \u2014 Benjamin Sutton* Holly Zausner, \u201CA Small Criminal Enterprise\u201D at Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, June 21-August 3Visual synecdoche is the order of the day in Holly Zausner\u2019s show, for which she has extracted frames from her earlier 16mm film of Berlin, then used them as pixels or building blocks for new photo collages, thereby reframing the way we appreciate both still photography and moving image, and emphasizing the beauty of the part in relation to the whole in each piece. &amp;nbsp;\u2014 Terri Ciccone[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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