Recommended: Shai Kremer, Maura Doyle, Larissa Fassler

A few shows I've seen of late and recommend taking in:

Shai Kremer at the newish Julie M Gallery is a great show. Kremer's an Israeli-born, New York-based artist who here presents very strong photographs of the Golan Heights area. The images really effectively show the legacy of conflict and war woven into the landscape, a pretty horrible mix of beauty and tragedy. Struck me at first as Burtynskyish, but for human conflicts rather than environmental ones.

Maura Doyle at Paul Petro is a gas. (I feel like I'm 80 using that description, but whatever.) Doyle's show "New Age Beaver" is themed on--you got it--beavers. Not only did the beaver happy face drawing on the wall crack me up, but so did Doyle's replicas of beaver-created objects previously described in books and field guides. Bizarre and fun.

Larissa Fassler at Interaccess is also worth a look. Born in Vancouver, Fassler trained at Concordia and lives in Berlin. Fassler's got a sculpture showing alongside a video work by Richard Schutz, but it's really Fassler's work that's the draw. It's a miniature replica of all the tunnels and hallways in a U-Bahn subway station. It looks kind of like a weird spaceship and I really liked the way it brought the underground up, revealing the invisible architectures of cities.

Finally, Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer's Chinese is a Plus at V-Tape provides an interesting look at migration and culture. Boisseau and Westermeyer are from France and Germany, respectively. The video itself is a bit dry and subtle, consisting simply of German students of Chinese language in conversation. One group of students is of Chinese descent, and talks a lot about cultural preservation and pride, while the other group, of German descent, talks more haltingly about an interest in Chinese food and cities. (Commerce more clearly drives the interests of this latter group, and culture the former.) There's something in all this that's a great portrait of cultural gaps, changes and stillnesses in a super-migratory world.

Image of one of Maura Doyle's beaver-sculpture replicas from Paul Petro