Two shows that opened Thursday were on my mind all weekend: Byron Kim’s Threshold at the Henry, and Dawn Cerny and Alice Tippit’s The Artful Pursuit of Happiness at SOIL, and I seriously recommend them both.

Kim uses the confrontational nature of monochrome to his advantage, softening it with inviting, referential titles, both questioning and asserting the medium as a conveyor of the essences of things. He also doesn’t do just one thing. He veers from conceptual abstraction (Synecdoche, a grid of panels painted the colors of sitters’ skin) to playful representation (Miss Mushinski (First Big Crush) mimics the green-and-blue-striped shirt he wore for three weeks straight after his grade-school teacher complimented him on it) to romantic manipulation (Through the Night (Skowhegan) is a swoon-inducing vision, looking upward, of trees silhouetted against a moonless, deep-blue night sky).

Cerny and Tippit’s installation I can barely describe. It is a riot of objects, a full-on storm of drawings, paintings, cut-outs, and plenty of other stuff that I’ll have to go back to fully record. Drawing everything together (or not, in a good way) is a fictional millionaire whose pursuits and preoccupations these objects represent. What’s there is elegant, satirical, silly, adolescent, old-fashioned and excessive. And from what I could tell, everybody is talking about it. (Anyone who saw Cerny’s show this spring at 4Culture will recognize the impulse behind the silhouettes.)

Sorry for the lack of pretty pictures here; I’m having trouble uploading.