Collier Schorr in New York

NEW YORK—If you’re a fan of the photography of Collier Schorr you may be surprised that her latest body of work, "There I Was," which is on view at Chelsea’s 303 Gallery through October 27 and appears next month in a book of the same name, employs drawing as its principal medium. But you’ll quickly recognize the artist’s ongoing engagement with various levels of fiction and reality. Here, as ever, she tiptoes around the fuzzy line separating the found and the invented, questioning notions of representation and creation.

In "There I Was," Schorr turns to an experience from her childhood as a conceptual starting point. When just four years old, the artist accompanied her father, an automobile journalist, on an assignment to write about muscle-car racer Charlie “Astoria Chas” Snyder and his '67 "Ko-Motion" Corvette. Schorr père’s article was titled “While Astoria Chas is doing his thing in Vietnam his friends are racing his L-88," though by the time it was published Snyder had been killed on active service. Now, 40 years later, a grown-up Schorr has researched Snyder’s brief life, and from his photographs and memorabilia produced a work that interweaves such themes as 1960s muscle-car counterculture and one young man’s experience of the Vietnam War with her own recollections of the period. As it erases the boundary between Schorr’s identity and her subject’s, with whom she shares a pair of initials, "There I Was" becomes a mesmerizing, and haunting, project.

Here are Schorr’s recommendations for shows to see this weekend in New York:

1. Up As If Down at Cuchifritos at Essex Street Market, through
October 20
“A group show of work by Shara Hughes, Peter Kreider, and Moises Saman about conceptions of ‘reality’ and how we come to accept what is ‘real.’ It’s unsuspectingly poetic, organized by Mari Spirito.”

2. T. J. Wilcox at Metro Pictures, through October 13
“A conflation of biographies. Wilcox makes truly beautiful histories from all over come together and form part of his own identity.”

3. Laurie Simmons at Skarstedt Gallery, through October 27
“A series of works from the mid-’80s that feature dolls color-coordinated with interiors lifted from design magazines. The pictures are touching tributes to looking and being looked at. There is a pure joy in them that can exist within a structure that would seem to be foreboding.”

4. Richard Prince: Spiritual America at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through January 9, 2008
“Prince celebrated masculinity in all its frailties at a time when masculinity was the subject of critique. Now his work reads more like autobiography as he has come so much closer to his concepts and created a new kind of documentary vocabulary.”

5. Ugo Rondinone: Big Mind Sky at Matthew Marks Gallery, through October 27
“Art that makes you want to touch it is always among my favorites. Here the gallery is filled with giant clay sculptures that look like a savant kid made them and put them in a machine that turned his five-inch-high creations into ones that are five feet high.”