This densely packed but taut group show, named after the cake that Celtic tribes used to portion out to choose a sacrificial victim for their Beltane bonfires—one of its slices was marked with ashes—was assembled by young curator Alex Gartenfeld around the subject of “sweetness.” At the gallery’s Grand Street location, the sweetness is a sensual or aesthetic expression of an earnest and unexceptionable pleasure in pleasure: David Scanavino’s modestly sophisticated patterns constructed from VCT tiles in the colors of a progressive Finnish nursery school, Cecily Brown’s densely vivid abstraction, Josephine Halvorson’s cheerily ominous portraits of clock numbers with a tone like Edward Gorey and even Ryan McGinley’s soul-baring, American Apparel-style nude C-print Heather all go about their business without apology or qualification. In the back room, Ed Atkins’s video Material Witness OR A Liquid Cop conducts a rapid, all-in epistemological investigation. Read More