In the riotous paintings on view in this show, Armenian-born Gegam Kacherian floats as rapturously through the Western art canon as he does through world cultures. The imagination, dreams and fantasy commingle with a range of painting styles to produce a Vegas-takes-on-art-history effect.

The instructional drumbeat of this show’s title—“Split, Splice, Splay, Display”—characterizes well the transparency and humor of Roman de Salvo’s best work. It describes in the most abbreviated manner the steps he takes to transform raw material (in this case, wood) into finished sculpture, and delivers the alliterative terms with a showman’s wink. De Salvo has a bit of the carnival barker’s performative flair (“It slices, it dices . . . ”) in addition to the patience and diligence of a fine craftsman.

SITE Santa Fe described its 2009 summer offering, slyly, as a “suite of three one-person exhibitions” presenting “whimsical” yet “simultaneously challenging experiences.” In point of fact, visitors were not so much challenged as visibly unnerved, at times, by a bevy of works seemingly intended to bring to life divers inchoate terrors—fears of suffocation, being blindfolded and things that go bump in the night.

BOY, the first film (2009) by musician-artist Cody Critcheloe, is a haunting and humorous gay coming-of-age story featuring music videos by the artist’s band, SSION (pronounced “shun”), which he founded when in high school and continued at the Kansas City Art Institute (where he graduated in 2003), and which is still active.

Ugo Rondinone might be called a curatorial artist. In 2007, he was given carte blanche to fill the Palais de Tokyo with modern and contemporary art. (None of Rondinone’s own work was included.)