Nemire’s paintings carry the same obscure emotional charge as video color test bands, glowing stripes of pure color that signal a pause before the start of the video’s narrative. The paintings are all variations on that “before” moment, endowing it with resonance as the primary subject.

Because it is a zany exploration of progress and decay, this is a work that, by its very nature, will unfold and only fully realize itself with the passage of time

The overriding mood in the gallery is inexplicably hopeful, perhaps a subliminal effect of the Buckminster Fuller term, “Tensegrity,” given to the exhibition. Fuller’s theory of tensegrity, the harmonious synergy and tension of parts within an integral structure.

Vacillation between equilibrium, a consistently busy surface that can be read as a singular gestalt, and the disequilibrium caused by the dark and sometimes opaque asymmetrical highlights that disrupt these linear networks, creates unpredictable rhythms within the iterations of abstract shapes.

Like the Impressionists, Friedman transfigures the contemporary world. What more could we ask of any artist?

Dawn Mellor: A Curse on Your Walls Team Gallery until August 8 83 Grand St., between Greene and Wooster streets, 212-279-9219 The Surrealist writer André Breton once declared that beauty would have to become convulsive, otherwise it would cease to be. As if in late vindication of this injunction, the paintings of Dawn Mellor set … Continued

This is Jess in a nutshell: sincere literalism colliding with arch semiotics and giving off rare alchemical heat.

There is a weird sense of a form searing its way through the canvas, from left to right, an accumulation of atomic energy boiling up the space it penetrates, making it a Monet for the nuclear age. It almost becomes tempting to read the image in cartoon-like graphic terms, or like a Futurist depiction of movement.

Wonder World is built of hard steel rods, bars and sheet steel that interact with somewhat more malleable slabs and blocks of concrete and rock board. The whole is tough, hard, aggressive and muscular—yet also slender, graceful, sensitive and wise.

The motifs of her seven paintings and four drawings are diverse to the point of perversity, suggesting the kind of mind drawn less to things than problems. What is consistent across these images is the sense of a fanatical empiricist picking quarrels with the perceived world.