Like many exhibitions lately, Mircea Cantor’s felt like a rebus, and a test. Called “White Sugar for Black Days,” it was eclectic in medium, message and emotional pitch. Scattered throughout the gallery’s two rooms was the show’s trademark work, 7 Future Gifts (2008)—a series of concrete ribbons tied around nothing. The invisible gifts ranged from a forlorn little thing placed in a far corner to a towering absence more than 12 feet high. Along with the show’s title, these ribbons, all topped with schematic bows, suggested a warning, perhaps to beware of empty promises. Or, to relinquish the hope that refined sweeteners can brighten our dark times, relieve our real and spiritual hunger.

With “Flatland,” the British artist Elizabeth McAlpine took film to its core elements: stock, light and projector. The show borrowed its title from the novella by Edwin A. Abbott that chronicles the story of “a square” discovering the three-dimensional world. In McAlpine’s exhibition, though, the narration was minimal. There was no distracting imagery in the works shown; viewers were confronted instead by the sheer materiality of the medium. In Tilt (in 6 Parts), 2009, six Super 8 projectors are stacked on top of each other and linked by a single loop of film. A column of six pale rectangles—the projection of white film frames—flickers onto the wall. Intermittently, a single red frame appears, descending from one position to the next. This jolly little color field brings to mind the dancing abstract shapes of an Oskar Fischinger animation; it’s a quick pulsation of warmth disrupting the mechanical procession of whiteness. The red square also function

The sculpture and works on paper in Wendy Kawabata’s exhibition at the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center explored the idea of critical mass, the point at which a simple gathering of marks or things becomes a larger, coherent whole. This calculation is integral to her work, which invokes a feminist agenda emphasizing strategies of reiteration and accumulation. As the artist notes in the exhibition catalogue, “My process of making is closely related to both drawing and to the history of utilitarian feminine craft. Repetitive and meditative acts—wrapping, poking, folding, stacking, hooking, pulling—all make space for quiet association and attentiveness.” Kawabata’s engagement with these activities creates a tension between their employment in a purely domestic context—daily work that can never truly achieve completion—and their use in art-making, where one might expect to arrive at a point of resolution.

Some believe that knowledge can ultimately tame the world, while others, like Peter Wegner, exult in the world’s wild unknowability. Wegner’s work gently pokes at the former group and its presumptuous definitions, mappings, systems and circumscriptions. “Terra Firma Incognita,” the title of this show and its centerpiece installation, sums up his position: we all stand firmly upon the elusive.

Just after her debut exhibition at Angles Gallery in 2008, the young L.A. painter Annie Lapin was invited to mount an installation in a 42-by-22-foot gallery at the nonprofit Grand Arts in Kansas City. In Parallel Deliria (2008), she spilled her work off the walls and onto the floor, filling the space with layers of painted Tyvek, tulle, fishing line and silver tape. It was clear that her earlier landscape paintings, however jarring and colorful, and dense with references to art history, architecture, fairy tales and myths, were constraining her ambitions. Slicing, dicing and ornamenting painted images of forests, mud-banks and rivers, Lapin created a kind of allover experience of nature with multiple perspectives and points of view.