So there was so much going on last month I didn’t get some things up that I wanted to let people know about, especially the April show at Vox Populi.

Actually, the Kristin Reynolds is still up in the back room, and tonight Voxumenta opens, which looks like it should be worth a visit (I’m counting on the wonderful Voxennial vibe from last year to carry over into this year).

So I’ll start with Reynolds since she’s still up. She’s got lumber and flat, patterned boards arranged in a gravity-defying cascade. This work would not have been made without Sarah Sze having gone before, but Reynolds pumps up the materials to a point where they no longer suggest delicacy or the whirl of the cosmos or ephemeral vulnerability.

What I liked best about this work were the rubber puddles on the floor and the cast creatures, sort of Mickey Mouse hands taking off on their own. I also liked the overblown pins. And I liked walking through the barriers in the space, like the displaced, low-floating clouds as well as the pokey pieces of lumber.

I took the work as a suggestion of disaster, of buildings falling, of the flat patterned boards as dislocated wallpaper patterns, although they looked like fabric patterns to me–but no matter, they seemed to be about the patterns life as we know it under some kind of threat. Which it is…

Also at Vox were works by Joseph Hu, who focused on paper sculptures this time in his Hard to Hold exhibit. I loved the Pop vibe of the cherry chapstick, which was the micro version of Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick. I also loved the craftsmanship made visible (almost) in the bowl. The works are recreations of objects of sentimental value to Hu, things he can’t quite bear to dispose of. In the care with which the sculptures were made and the considered, simplifications of the originals, the emotion comes through.

I thought the toothpick holder won the prize as an unnecessary object that somehow survives all the cuts because someone we love gave it to us.

I also liked stepping among Gabriel Boyce’s stuffed birds in his Gone Borneo exhibit at Vox. The beautifully crafted creatures overpowered the small models of things like boats. But both had a funny toy-like quality. The realistic bird poses battle with the stuffed toy quality and the paper feathers for dominance, and make these objects open enough for some wide-ranging speculation.

And Sarah Daub’s paper cut-out drawings, in her Close Call exhibit, the best of them have a creepy fear factor that threatens with the most unstable of materials. I especially liked the ones where Daub creates a back layer of paint that fills in some of the cut-out spaces. Daub made it into the Arcadia Works on Paper show, this year.

In the Video Lounge was work by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. The one I enjoyed from beginning to end, Blowback, depicted people dressed in Arab garb emerging from behind trees and approaching until they form a phalanx in an idyllic park scene. The approaching group has a floaty quality, unrooted from the real ground. And the whole scene raises questions about our assumptions and fantasies about people and threats and safe places.