7/11/09 3:02 PM

Both Jory Drew and Angel Hernandez make art out of the stuff of everyday life, presumably their everyday lives. Though they work in radically different materials and styles, this critical attention to their surroundings warrants attention. Hernandez takes a pictorial tack, rendering the zombies and jokers of contemporary Hollywood as if they were the icons of today—icons of violence and trickery, but icons nonetheless. Once upon a time, icons were great politicians, religious figures, even great artists. But icons need to serve a purpose, and if the ones of yesterday mean little today, then new ones, however problematic, will step in to take their place—like the ones Hernandez depicts here.

Drew, meanwhile, uses the literal materials of the quotidian, turning cigarette packs and butts, cheap rhinestones, jean tags and manga cut-outs to create intimate tableaux with allegorical leanings, not least in the sense that junk can be turned into meaningful matter, even it might genuinely be junk in its original form. No one, not even a young adult, thinks cigarettes are good for you, however much fun they may be to smoke. Better to take a used up pack and turn it into something meaningful, like an artwork decorated with candy-colored skulls, which deftly references at once the continued appeal of smoking and its stupid harmfulness.

—Lori Waxman