in the wake of the BP oil spill, among others that capture the visual poetry of life and labor in south Louisiana. Similarly, John Barnes' stark shotgun house sculptures, and Keith Perelli's lyrically surreal portraits based on police mug shots, meld gritty urban chaos with an incipient visionary aura that hints at the possibility of transcendence. 
James Goedert's MACHINES ON PAPER show at Antenna features, among other things, a 1970s-era Ford Granada with Nebraska plates. Also too large for the gallery door, this is a real car that was taken apart and reassembled inside--with modifications. The seats now surround the relocated steering wheel, which when turned activates some engine parts reconfigured into a mechanism that sketches an abstract drawing of a car, as if the Granada had taken up art in its old age.
On the wall is a landscape painting like an expanse of green grass on paper; beneath it on the floor rests the weedeater that created it with colored markers tied to its plastic trim cords. Other everyday devices appear with their equally unlikely creations, and here Goedert reveals how old machines can be reconfigured to make art while incidentally providing a sense of what surrealism might have looked like had it originated in Middle America instead of Paris. ~Bookhardt
MACHINES ON PAPER: New Work by James Goedert, Through Feb. 5
Antenna, 3161 Burgundy Street, 250-7975; http://www.press-street.com/
