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Museum And Gallery

State of the art

Milton Stevenson’s The Beginning of My Ascent to the Center of the Universe is a large flashy jokey installation in ’80s DayGlo rainbow colors of cardboard cutouts of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, framed celebrity pictures (Mr. T, Erkel, Bill Cosby, Will Smith), celebrity magazine covers with googly eyes pasted onto the faces of Britney Spears and Tom Cruise, and plastic toys stuck on striped sticks. It looks like something that escaped from a neighborhood carnival midway. I mean that in a good way. Smart-alecky slogans proclaim: “Note to Rachael Ray: Delish is not a word”; “Note to Brooklyn: Your pants are too tight”; “I had sex with a robot.” Stevenson slathers on too much obnoxious badass snark for me, but it taps something magnetic in our celebrity-driven trash culture.

Also notable are Sungee Pae’s delicate etchings and screenprints of trees and parking lots; Amanda Lebel’s large annotated drawing of a minibus; Natalie Wright’s cartoony line drawings of family photographs which become wallpaper patterns; Mark Nicholson’s gray wool felt chair; Jueun Chung’s  accordion book mandala; Andrew Khoo’s mama computer and baby robot; and Zeke Leonard’s Boat Chair, which looks like a red oak dory hung upright from its bow and swinging from a steel chain.