Riddle me this: Just what is it that continues to make Carol Bove’s focused yet multifaceted sculptural practice so uniquely satisfying? A simple answer might start with her materials—a carefully calibrated mix of concrete cubes and I-beams, petrified wood and peacock feathers, geometric figures fashioned in delicate brass and powder-coated steel, and well-thumbed paperback books and other esoteric ephemera. These items come together in shelf works, sculptural assemblages, and exhibition tableaux that read equally as modern and ancient, industrial and organic, utopian and brutal, hopeful and melancholic. Then there is the mythology of their origin to consider—either in Bove’s Northern California upbringing or her current life within the post-industrial wilderness of South Brooklyn, where materials like driftwood and desiccated mattresses literally wash up at her feet. (Both of which are part of the artist’s exhibition “The Equinox,” which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 12, 2014.) But there is also something else at work. A productive vagueness animates all of Bove’s work from the last decade or so, meandering between familiarity and enigma while engaging the viewer’s attention at both conscious and subconscious levels. Those two registers of understanding—the analytic and the intuitive—are pushed …

Rob Pruitt’s joint exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Maccarone, “Pattern and Degradation,” presses a few of my buttons. Even before stepping into the gallery I had some concerns—the notion of filling over 8,200 square feet with two years of new work without compromising quality seems a stretch, so naturally the show’s theme is about excess. According to the press release, the work is informed by the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, a two year rite of passage in which Amish teenagers are allowed to indulge in all the excesses of modern life before returning to a more modest existence. Pruitt’s exhibition posits a world in which he lives in a “Permanent Rumspringa,” a concept that sounds suspiciously like a marketing ploy to explain over-production. Seeing as how only two rooms of eight directly deal with Amish culture, there’s not much reason to think otherwise even if indulging in contemporary excess is likely to occasionally exclude a lot of the religion. At the far end of Gavin Brown, rows of both modernist and traditional Amish chairs coated in silver weakly gesture to the religion, as do a number of large patterned paintings referencing traditional Amish quilting. The basic gist of these pieces …