Faux architecture

At Samsøn: Antoniadis & Stone, the sculptor duo, make trompe l’oeil sculpture. It looks like crumbling, toppling concrete and metal from drab institutional buildings (or from modern architecture, such as the Brutalist Boston City Hall, which is in fact a drab institutional building), but it’s all newly crafted, made of plastic, particle board, and urethane foam. What the work appears to be (depressing) and what it actually is (well-crafted down to tiny details, and sly) collides and sets off little sparks of friction in the imagination. They’ll be in the 2012 deCordova Biennial, opening later this month. As will Caitlin Berrigan, whose work is in a deep little show of studio artists at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery, curated by Kara Braciale of Proof Gallery, which takes a wide view of portraiture. Berrigan examines our attitudes toward civilian deaths in Iraq with an audio piece of her simply counting the outrageous numbers. Also on view there: Silvia López Chávez’s lively, fluid portraits of her niece, Maria Cristina, such as the one on the right, examining the urge to perform. Finally, Nesto Gallery at Milton Academy hosts kinetic sculptor Anne Lilly, whose stainless steel interactive works look like machines, but enter into the most astonishing and graceful dances when you interact with them. The principal actors are usually groups of steel rods, which nod and bow and unfurl in groups with magical deliberation.