3 art shows to see before the State Fair takes over Minnesota

With more warm summer days ahead in the Twin Cities, now is the time to go inside and enjoy air-conditioned galleries. Three art exhibitions in Minneapolis highlight strange sculptural objects made of glass, forgotten artworks from the early ‘90s and mesmerizingly abstract paintings. Swing by these galleries and cool off.

If a bulbous, deep-sea creature like the mysterious humpback anglerfish was grabbed out of the deep ocean, turned inside out, cast in glass, adorned with silver and gold chains, and then thrown back in, it might look something like Kate Casanova’s abstract glass sculptures. “Dangle” is a pink- and yellow-tinted shape that looks like an oversized tear, dripping with gold and silver chains, and pink and green goo. “Me and Also Me” looks like a two-headed worm with green glass heads, connected by silver rope. Casanova usually works with silicone, molding it like Play-Doh into weird configurations. It’s her first time working with glass, but from the looks of each work she seems like a pro. Each object in this show is enchanting, with the exception being the appearance of a single neon Croc clog and other objects that feel too plucked from everyday life dropped into these sculptures. They take the viewer out of the fantastical world she’s crafted. Ends Aug. 3. (Noon-4 p.m. Sat., 5-9 p.m. first Thu. of the month, or by appt., Kolman & Reeb Gallery, 1500 NE. Jackson St., Studio 395, Mpls., free, 612-385-4239 or kolmanreebgallery.com)

Summer calls for get-togethers at the lake, biking, late-night walks and barbecues. At Bockley Gallery, it’s a get-together of artworks by younger artists who have recently had solo shows at the gallery or elsewhere, such as Pao Houa Her, Leslie Barlow, Eric-Paul Riege, Grace Rosario Perkins and Matthew Kirk, alongside older artists such as Stuart Nielsen and Morgan (formerly Clarence Morgan). It’s the seasoned artists’ works that stand out the most among the familiar backdrop of the usual (and at times overexposed) up-and-comers. Morgan’s abstract, smaller-scale paintings from the early ‘90s include the swirly colorful “Marginally Seductive,” which looks like there’s an alien embedded in it, sticking out its tongue at two black holes. Nielsen’s otherworldly bronze-cast sculpture “just a dream I had in 1984″ — with two upside-down hands, one with a plant blooming from it, the other with seven colored balls resting inside it — gives viewers a chance to wonder about their own subconscious visions. Ends Aug. 10. (Noon-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat., 2123 W. 21st St., Mpls., free, 612-377-4669 or bockleygallery.com)

Artist Syed Hosain’s paintings fall somewhere between abstraction and figurative, collage works and aerial photographs. Each one has a story to tell. He won’t explain that story, but it’s possible to untangle the meaning depending on how long one looks at these intensive artworks. This exhibition includes 11 selected works made between 2021 and 2024, each creating a world of their own. From a distance, “Quantum Trajectories” looks like a pointillist painting gone wrong (too many dots?), but look closer and discover a fire at the bottom and a black-and-white peppered canvas above. At the same time, it looks like aerial shots of megacities like Lagos, Delhi or Cairo, where people’s heads appear like endless streams. Some of the people are dressed in white, and they might be walking the Hajj to the sacred city of Mecca. One face was visible in there, and the artist said it was a Palestinian man from Gaza. Hosain, who identifies as Muslim, is originally from Pakistan. Ends Aug. 3. (Noon-5 p.m. Thu.-Sat., NE Sculpture Gallery Factory, 1720 NE. Madison St., #14, Mpls., free, 612-743-6664 or ne-sculpture.org)