This was one of those months when I saw so much and couldn’t keep up. So I’m just throwing some images up here of some things that interested me, some more so than others, but all of which I thought were worth some mention. And that doesn’t even count Voxumenta, of which I wrote a big zippo. But there are images of that at least on my Flickr site.

Randy Bolton at SchmidtDean showed work about the fading natural world, burnt into paper and onto the cut edges of logs. The images still have his trademark storybook touch. The best of them leave something unsaid and open to interpretation. Tomorrow is the exhibit’s last day.

Also at SchmidtDean through tomorrow, Michael Gallagher’s Old Masters technique and still life imagery have gone somewhere deeply weird in this outing, with generic birds that flit like leaves amidst the fruit, all of it floating in front of a blue, blue sky. Atop all the control, looser gestures of paint suggest movement and light. Can this be heaven?

This solo show by encaustic paintings Tremain Smith at Rosenfeld–she also has work up at Siano in ORDER(ed)–brings in a new richness of color to her layered grids of encaustic embedded with other media. The show runs until the 31st.

Also at Rosenfeld, Julia Brown brings her technical wizardry to clay paintings and sculptures. She draws from Eastern and Western clay traditions in her sculptures and makes use of water-color like layers of glaze, texture, and collage materials in what I can only think of as clay paintings. The range alone is worth the visit.

For a visual tour of some of Annabeth Rosen’s spectacular clay sculptures and related drawings at Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, visit my Flickr site here. The work made me think of barnacles and sea urchins, but there were also industrial and body imagery in this exuberant work. Here’s a link to Edie Newhall’s review in today’s Inky. The work is up until June 10.

Polish posters in the back room at little PII Gallery serve as a reminder that even in this global, one-art-world era, East is not West, and West is not East, and there are cultural differences. I enjoyed these for punchy imagery that would never be used in our neck of the woods.

At the Clay Studio, Requa, a line-up of clay bottles on a shelf by Nancy Selvin communicated a bit of Morandi oddness and humanity. The text was obscure but the forms spoke volumes. The piece stood out in a show called “Content: The Written Word,” which also included political messages on surprising, controlled clay shapes by Richard Burkett, cartoons on clay by Scott Rench, and clay books by Holly Hanessian. The show runs to May 28.