John Powers in New York

NEW YORK—To most people, Styrofoam is junk, something you throw away after you unpack your new computer or toaster oven. But to 37-year-old Brooklyn-based artist John Powers, it’s more treasure than trash. He’s been working in the material for the past six years, creating forms evocative of everything from Sol Lewitt’s modular cubes to the menacing spaceships in classic science-fiction movies.

For Powers’s second solo show at Virgil de Voldère gallery in Chelsea, on view through March 29, he broke somewhat from his previous practice, adding metal and, in some pieces, experimenting with asymmetry. The centerpiece is Empire (2008), a 45-inch sphere constructed from 1-by-2-by-3-inch Styrofoam blocks and suspended from the ceiling. The outer facets of its jagged surface are covered in anodized aluminum strips, inviting viewers to peer closely and see snippets of their reflections—an eye here, an earlobe there. Thus their likenesses become fractured and unnerving, just like the overall form.

Two smaller mirrored pieces, Anarcha (2008) and Phineas Gage (2008), protrude from the wall like horizontal stalactites. The titles refer to two famously disfigured people in history—the first an African-American slave whose master subjected her to experiments, the second a railroad worker injured in a blast. On the floor, in the corner, is Spiral Jedi (2008)—pun intended—a “growing jumble,” says Powers, to which he will add a few blocks of aluminum-covered Styrofoam every couple of days.

For his works on paper, called “White on Whites,” Powers lowers his artistic voice to a whisper. He stacks small cutout rectangles on top of one another, building up abstract compositions the same way he builds up his abstract sculptures, but without the disco-ball glitz. Don’t miss them.

Here are Powers’s recommendations for what not to miss in New York this weekend:


Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, at MoMA, March 2–May 12

Ruth Root at Andrew Kreps Gallery through March 16

“This is a two-fer that makes me happy because I am a fan of grid painting. Maybe because I work with it so little, I get really excited by color, even if it’s just the logo for Altria. (Which I don’t see so much now that they’ve cut their support for the arts. What happened there?) Every time I see a great grid painting I think about how hard they are to do (I tried in school), but yet, I’ve never seen an ugly bookcase: Somehow the random assortment of colored spines on a bookshelf is always beautiful to me. I love checking out my friends’ bookshelves (yes, I am that guy) and browsing shelves of used books. More than snooping or shopping it’s finding accidental art that I like—there is no such thing as an ugly jumble of books. The Modern opens “Color Chart,” which explores chance and color, this weekend, and I’m adding Ruth Root in here because her work is another fun take on grid painting."

Composer Showcase: Tristan Perich at the Whitney Museum, Friday, February 29 at 7 p.m.

“I am not without my eyes open,” performed by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, Saturday, March 1 at 7 p.m.

This is another two-fer! Tristan Perich has two shows this weekend: On Friday he is performing 1-Bit Music live, and on Saturday one of his compositions will be performed by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn.

"1-Bit Music was my introduction to Tristan’s art. The piece is an edition of self-contained computerized (Clearly I am not a tech-geek, as I don’t know a better word than ‘computerized’ for what this thing is) music players, each housed in a CD jewel case and each programmed (rather than recorded) with an album’s worth of blip music. The music is built up out of the detritus noise of digital electronics, but it’s poppy and fun and at the same time rigorous.

“Tristan is part of a group of serious young composers that approach electronic music with a rigorous passion for their specific media I had not expected to see in my lifetime—think Richard Serra’s films, if Richard Serra had made films that were fun. When I first saw one of Tristan’s performances I felt like I had been transported back to a Judson-era performance, or a downtown loft in the ’70s. The shows involve tangles of wiring, video projections of pop-up windows (complete with hunting cursors), and odd machines. Among this computer esoterica is Tristan, with spiky hair and a skinny tie jamming at the keyboard of a Mac.”

“Subjective Histories of Sculpture II: Sanford Biggers,” a lecture at the Theresa Lang Center at The New School, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York. Monday, March 3 at 6:30 p.m.

Sanford Biggers: Front Room at D’Amelio Terras, through March 15

Yet another two-fer. The Sculpture Center in Long Island City has been doing a great series of talks in association with The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and next Monday they present Sanford Biggers, who also has a video up at D’Amelio Terras. These “Subjective Histories of Sculpture” talks are not conventional artist talks—for his, Paul Pfeiffer discussed caryatids on the Acropolis and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Biggers will be riffing on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, pianos in trees, Sun Ra, and afro-futurism. (The next talk, by Bob “The Body” Morris on April 7, should be a kick in the ass. Best known for his 1960s minimalist work and his polemics, Morris has written some no-holds-barred attacks on some of the art world’s biggest players, including one about latter-day giganticism in art called "Size Matters.")

"Majik: Tim Laun" at Parker’s Box, through March 3

Roxy Paine at Madison Square Park, through February 29

This is a sad two-fer. Two pieces I really like are coming down this weekend, but this is not a momento mori two-fer. It’s not too late!

Tim Laun’s “Majik” is the capstone of his Green Bay Packers obsessional arc. Laun’s JumboTron-like work Don Majkowski (Sunday, September 20th, 1992) shows the injured quarterback but evokes Brett Favre, who replaced Majkowski and has been the subject of Laun’s work for the past four years. While Dave Hickey challenged art in his essay “Frivolity and Unction” to be more like sport—to abandon the premise that art has to be good for us and can just be—this installation slips past frivolity and into the strange, even romantic territory of fever dreams. I will stop now before I start to slip into sports metaphors/puns.

Last spring I spent an afternoon at the Shake Shack watching Roxy Paine’s project get installed. It was a little drizzly but still a great way to burn an afternoon. For those who haven’t seen it, Paine installed Conjoined—life-size, stainless-steel trees attached at their branch tips, creating a kind of sylvan fork lighting—as well as Defunct, the DeLorean of dead trees, and a third piece, Erratic, which I didn’t love. The work is being disassembled over the next few days, and skilled art-rigging is an art form unto itself, and one that the public hardly ever gets to see. If you’re near the park this weekend, stop and see what’s happening. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see one of these behemoths swinging through the air.