London’s galleries are open again. Exhibitions that were paused or postponed last fall have emerged from enforced hibernation into a cultural environment altered by six months of—well, not very much. To a quarantine-addled critic, this presents a quandary. One of the pleasures—and pitfalls—of writing about art is using it as a measure of lived experience: of holding work up to the light and saying, ah yes, this reminds me of something. The problem is, I haven’t much new experience against which to gauge the work. But maybe I’m not alone. In the capital’s galleries I kept noticing pieces, many made over this past year, that described a version of the same space—an unstable interior, variously possessed and infiltrated by outside forces. Which is to say, a state of mind. Or was I just projecting? Leidy Churchman’s “The Between is Ringing,” at Rodeo’s Bourdon Street space, is a small, rewarding show of a dozen new paintings that range from smudgy abstraction to cartoonish exuberance. The work subtitled Diptych (all works share a main title with the exhibition and are dated 2020) comprises two oil-on-linen paintings, stacked one atop the other, depicting an abstracted living room that is also an existential void. The …

The group of sculptures gathered here feel like the remnants of some stranded explorer’s dedicated toil, the evidence of an island-bound prisoner bent on making the most of his imposed yet paradisiacal isolation. And it’s this placid, oceanic mood that dominates “Dreams Chunky,” Jack Lavender’s first solo show at The approach, amplified by the sunlit water pattern of the laminate mat that covers most of the floor of the first gallery. A suitably aqueous soundtrack fills the room unobtrusively, emanating from a retro-futuristic ghetto blaster that hangs from a metal chain, hovering over the plastic floor like a strange totem (Falling Waters, all works 2013). There is an ethnographic quality to the young London-based artist’s work, and a slight nod towards the supernatural properties bestowed upon the material traces of foreign cultures, like in Melanesian cargo cults. An assembly of nimble assemblages of found objects, like flotsam washed up on the seashore. Yet on closer inspection, there’s a logic to their organization. Consider Dreams Chunky 3, for example, where a series of elements—including hooks, a paint tube, a glass leaf and glass bottle, plastic fruit, a dog toy, a crystal pineapple, and a Spiderman-printed canvas—appear ensnared in a metallic grid, like …