Since his graduation from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005, Tris Vonna-Michell has traveled to the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and various other locations to seek out histories based on personal, and often autobiographical, inquiries.

Above all else, Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles serves to disrupt the demons that long lay dormant in Burchfield’s legacy. The exhibition was curated by Robert Gober, an artist known for destabilizing the iconography of the everyday, so his attraction to Burchfield might suggest some political affinity buried beneath a bygone America.

Sex is the pretext at the Michael Kohn Gallery’s SHE: Images of Women by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince.

Nearly two thousand years ago, in 79 ad, the Roman city of Pompeii was destroyed and buried by two days of lava swells and volcanic ash from Mt. Vesuvius. Among the ruins, the city’s excavation in 1860 unearthed cavities formed by the bodies of residents trapped within the lava, their burned voids fossilized by the hardened ash.

In the chilled air of early spring, Lake Huron stretches into a crystalline body with no end in sight. The second largest of the great lakes, Huron borders most of Michigan’s east coast. In Ann Mikolowski’s “Ghostrider” (1988), thin layers of oil paint split the lake’s horizon into a sweeping gray and a turbulent blue that, together, evoke Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman in their consuming passage to the sublime.