The best thing here is Lav A2 (1999), a lifesize (apparently) working replica of an airliner bathroom built from foamcore, glue, and a Craftsman portable wet/dry vac. Sachs nails all the details, down to the kleenex dispenser and the light-up “Return to seat” sign. It’s an ingenious, obsessive joke that’s taken on dark undertones now that we live in the era of airplane anxiety.
Nutsy’s Tableau (2002-2003) is a giant, elaborately constructed racetrack for remote-control cars, complete with drawbridge, speed gun, a tunnel through a refrigerator (for beer, naturally), Rube Goldberg mazes, a ring of fire, and a mini foamcore gas station. It’s like the coolest basement hobby project ever — if you can get past the bad-asser-than-thou shop-geek attitude.
The exhibit is rounded out by an old office desk that Sachs converted into a stylish saw table, a custom drill press, specialized tool boxes, and prototypes for a sink and toilet. They’re neat, but they lack the conceptual zing of his best stuff.
Related:
Turn on the bright lights, New new things, Expanded within, More 
- Turn on the bright lights
Art this fall grapples with issues like gender and journalism, personal space and human survival, and what to have for lunch.
- New new things
Robolobster, an underwater crustacean with eight plastic legs and an industrial-strength plastic shell, is a groundbreaking example of the new science of biomimicry.
- Expanded within
On the inside, though, it feels like a much larger museum has been magically folded into the fine old neo-classical structure.
- Selective strife
Portland Museum of Art’s “In Our Time: The World as Seen By Magnum Photographers,” is quite literally a catalogue of the most virtuosic photojournalistic photographs in the last half-century.
- Drawing connections
The Portland Museum of Art’s challenge in presenting an architectural exhibition is akin to the finger that points to the moon.
- Rubber soul
Pink satin ribbon, rubber inner tubes, and large swaths of flowing organza are some of the materials that Nicholas Hlobo uses in various media to examine gender, ethnicity, and his South African heritage.
- Questioning the Real
The Maine College of Art’s MFA thesis group show rides a questionable line between relevant social critique buoyed by valid critical theory and an egocentric interplay of misplaced postmodern gestures.
- Smells like free spirit
Encountering Charlie Hewitt’s work for the first time, at his Farnsworth Museum retrospective, was like meeting someone from the neighborhood where you grow up long after you’ve grown up.
- Naughty by nature
Landscape has inspired artists as varied as the romantic 19th-century Hudson River School painters and the macho 20th-century Earth Artists.
- Monkey see, monkey do
So thorough and deadpan is the joke that Catherine Chalmers pulls off in her ravishing color photographs of insects crawling across flowers they resemble that when I read the wall text I was sure there had been a mistake. Slideshow: Going Ape: Confronting Animals In Contemporary Art at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
- OOH-OO CHILD
Childhood in America comes under the artist’s gaze in Pine Flat , the fifth film by Sharon Lockhart, and it’s examined with precision and attention to detail.
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