Straight off a run at New York’s Robert Mann Gallery, Holly Andres‘ acclaimed Sparrow Lane exhibition is currently wowing Southern Californians at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles. The show is on view at the West Hollywood gallery through Valentine’s Day, and Andres will be on hand for a reception on January 17.

Ray Jones found a lot to like in the DNJ exhibition, which he details in his insightful and thorough review for Art Scene.

Quality Pictures’ debut exhibition of Sparrow Lane last summer was reviewed in the December issue of Art in America; the review is not online, but can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Last, but certainly not least, Andres’ show at Quality Pictures was singled out by John Motley at the Portland Mercury as one of the highlights of 2008.

Tonight, Galerie Rautenstrauch opens Wintersalon, a visual exploration of ice drifts, snowscapes, and glaring winter light. Oliver Boberg’s 16 mm film, “Brucke,” will be shown with the exhibition; Portlanders will remember Boboerg’s haunting still image of the same name, which was included in his show at QPCA last winter. Wintersalon looks to have a nice variety of interesting work, so if you’re in Frankfurt this month, make sure you stop by to check things out. [Galerie Rautenstrauch, Jahnstr. 12, Frankfurt, Germany, Dec 6, 2008-Jan 3, 2009]

Greeting from the Aqua Wynwood Art Fair in Miami!

Contrary to popular belief, the crowds did come.  Here they are in our booth:

Actually the crowds have been great.  Lots of people and steady interest.  Plus, it has been nice catching up with so many of my art world friends.

Quality Pictures is proud to present Emergents, a new installation by Nick Raffel in the gallery’s back project space. Inspired by the principles of fractal geometry and self-replication, Emergents is a remarkable play of paper and shadows, instigated by the artist’s unique and systematic process. Beginning with a single sheet of drafting paper, cut into a delicate, web-like pattern, Raffel suspends the latticed paper from his studio ceiling, tracing the shadows it casts on the wall. He creates another template from that tracing, repeating this process dozens of times until he has accumulated a small colony of shapes that evoke the organic patterns of biological, economic, psychological, and mathematical systems. Finally, these translucent webs are suspended from the ceiling, creating an intricate theater of shadows and muted tones on the gallery walls. Emergents opens tonight, December 4, and remains on view through December 23.

Thursday night, December 4, Visage Eyewear in the Pearl District hosts a screening of three films by Grace Carter and Holly Andres. Straight off its Best Cinematography win at the Baltimore Women’s Film Fest, Carter and Andres’ pulpy short, Nora, screens with Brave New Girl and Dandelion at 7 pm. Visage is located at NW 11th and Johnson; more info about the event can be found here.

We would also be remiss in not mentioning the great mention that Andres received on Jen Beckman’s Hey Hot Shot blog yesterday, as well as her upcoming show at the DNJ Gallery in Los Angeles.

D.K. Row penned a very thoughtful review of Kojo Griffin’s Swing States of Mind for the November 21 edition of the Oregonian. Read the entire review here, after letting this gem of a sentence roll around your head for a few minutes: “Griffin’s cartoonish, faux-naive style casts his tense tales of Hobbesian evolution in their own little hole of a world.”

Swing States of Mind is on view through December 23.

In one week (12.03-12.07), Quality Pictures proudly presents The Psychology of Interiors at the Aqua Wynwood Art Fair in Miami. The exhibition pairs two artists who have traffic in the elusive realm often referred to as the uncanny and unsettling: painter Eric White and photographer Roger Ballen. Those not visiting Miami, however, have plenty of opportunities to catch Ballen’s work at the moment. The Johannesburg-based artist is currently exhibiting at the following venues:

Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal: Roger Ballen at the National Library of Australia (Canberra), 11.26.08-3.29.09

Solo exhibition at Poland’s leading contemporary art center, the BWA Gallery (Katowice), through 01.01.09

Construct: Beyond the Documentary Photograph at the Durban Art Gallery, Durban, South Africa, through 1.31.09

Untitled (Vicarious): Photographing the Constructed Object (group show) at Gagosian Gallery (Madison Ave, NYC), through 12.20.08

Ballen also created a brand new photograph for the online project, @600, which is now online. (Works by Brian Ulrich and Jason Fulford will join Roger’s shortly. For more information about Roger Ballen or Aqua Wynwood, please contact Quality Pictures.

Holly Andres’ current exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery received a nice shout-out from New York Magazine’s art and culture blog earlier this week. Reproducing Andres’ compelling new image, “The Spilt Milk,” the writer describes the “bonbon-hued” photographs of Sparrow Lane as “horror-tinged scenes that would have drawn froth from Lewis Carroll’s mouth.” The exhibition continues at Robert Mann through December 6; two weeks later, Southern California gets the chance to visit Sparrow Lane, as Los Angeles’ DNJ Gallery exhibits Andres’ photos from December 20-February 14.

The new issue of the Portland Mercury hits the streets today, sporting the classiest cover since a certain young photographer turned the weekly paper on its head (literally) in 2006. Kojo Griffin’s 2002 drawing of a elephant sorrowfully reading the morning paper graces the cover of the current Mercury (alongside a headline crowing about the recent Democrat victories). The Mercury can be found citywide, and “Untitled” (2002), is on view at QPCA through December 23 as part of Griffin’s Swing States of Mind. The paper’s art critic, John Motley, dubbed the exhibition a “staff pick,” drawing attention to the “monochromatic silhouettes [which] haunt empty, vaguely corporate spaces,” in Griffin’s newest paintings, which Motley applauds as newfound “complicated, formal terrain.”

Quality Pictures artist Brian Ulrich joins William Eggleston, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and other surveyors of the American scene in Lost in the Supermarket, the second in a series of three exciting shows at the Armand Bartos Gallery. Sign/Age explores the legacy of Pop Art and its celebratory critique of advertising and consumerism. Lost in the Supermarket “includes works that are in direct conversation with our consumer-based culture, taking on the subject from all angles.” The show opens tomorrow, November 20, with a reception from 6-8pm, and continues through December 19.

Lost in the Supermarket is just one of several exhibitions featuring Ulrich’s photographs at the moment: His work can also be seen at Kansas City’s Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (through Dec 14); Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes at the Carnegie Museum of Art (through Jan 18, 2009); and Made in Chicago, Photographs from the Bank of America LaSalle Collection at the Chicago Cultural Center (through Jan 4, 2009).