Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)
Laddie John Dill, “Elementary,” at Nyehaus, 358 West 20th Street, through July 26
Tim Nye’s cavernous Chelsea townhouse-turned-gallery is the perfect setting in which to view Laddie John Dill’s mesmerizing light art, spread over three floors and ranging from his signature 1970s “Light Sentences” — jewel-like ropes of multi-colored glass, lit and vibrating with varying degrees of intensity — to more recent landscapes made of sand and strategically placed, gas-illuminated panes of glass, the edges of which emit a hypnotic glow. — Eileen Kinsella
Ana Mendieta, “Late Works: 1981-85” at Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, through June 22
It is abundantly clear from this show of works from the last years of Ana Mendieta’s career that her visual lexicon was informed by a transcendent understanding of the female form, whether in the eerily lit mud pieces (now cracked and dried, but still well-preserved) shown in the front gallery space, the more formal sculpture “Fernwoman” (1982) that is nearly life-size at five-feet tall and solemnly presides over the space like a totem, or the faint outline of her own body seen in the silent but explosively violent documentary footage of the earthworks she called “siluetas.” — Alanna Martinez
Marianne Vitale, “Diamond Crossing” at Zach Feuer, 548 West 22nd Street, through June 15
Marianne Vitale’s bravura installation, consisting of a salvaged train track juncture in the shape of a giant X covering the gallery floor, functions as a wry comment on a plethora of non-necessarily-locomotive-related themes, from the romanticization of post-industrial refuse to the grandiose gestures of typically-male steel sculptors. — Benjamin Sutton