You’re not supposed to look at the dying, the dead; you turn away. Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout looks.

Westerhout takes pictures of falling or fallen cities—Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Detroit—focusing on sites of deserted industry and community. She spatially and temporally trespasses, highlighting such spaces’ scars and water damage, ugly backsides and decay. Nobody’s supposed to see this stuff.

Her photographs, on display at Electric Works through February 27, are now up for everyone to see. Like other visually stunning images of decay (Richard Misrach’s photograph of a flooded house, done in 1985, comes to mind), they inspire wonder, dismay, even guilt. Wonder for the imagined lives that unfolded in these places; dismay over their abrupt ends; guilt for not stepping in to stop it. …more

I like things to be accessible; it’s important for me to communicate to the non-art crowd as well as those more versed in art appreciation so I keep the entrance point as accessible as possible and leave it up to the viewer to see how far they want to take their understanding of the piece. …more

Friday night I walked up the crowded and sweaty streets near Union Square to Silverman Gallery for the opening of Captain!, new paintings and collages by Luke Butler.

Butler deals in masculine icons of the sixties and seventies—dead presidents and Star Trek officers. In “Leaders of Men,” he decapitates former world leaders and attaches their heads to porn stars’ bodies. We get a naked Richard Nixon reclining on a box of Wheaties and a well-endowed Gerald Ford staring out from a magazine page, an ad for a giant dildo named El Perfecto beside his smiling face. The pieces highlight our culture’s reverence for the male form while introducing vulnerability into symbols of masculine power. No one can be that strong, they say. …more

Lately I’ve been trying to put myself together—eating seaweed and swimming laps. But Jennie Ottinger’s paintings, up at Johansson Projects in Oakland, reminded me it’s okay to fall apart. …more

I was all ready to feel guilty. A group show of environmentally themed artworks–what other response is there? But I didn’t. Next New: Green, at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, manages to approach the subject of climate change and the environment without pointing any fingers. …more