send to printer

September 28-October 4, 2006

Arts Agenda : Last Chance

Last Chance

Catch It or Regret It

by Rachel Frankford

Red Herring
Runs through Sept. 30, Stagecrafters Theater, 8130 Germantown Ave., 215-247-8881

Philadelphia playwright Michael Hollinger spoofs film noir and 1950s nuclear paranoia with his farce Red Herring, in which a hard-boiled girl detective and her FBI agent boyfriend get into all kinds of trouble as they try to track down an incompetent fisherman/spy and some H-bombs.

Japanada via Franoronto
Runs through Sept. 30, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., second floor, 215-574-7630

I don't have any idea what the hell's going on here, but it's fun to look at. Space 1026 collected artists from Japan, Canada and, um, other places, and billed the results as "the coolest country ever. Not yet confirmed." Michael Comeau's posters for (mostly LGBT) Toronto events such as Hump Day Bump take up one wall, and Nuvish's happy psychedelic grotesques are a slightly frightening highlight. But, best of all, there are jackalopes—long confirmed to be the most awesome example of fusion on earth.

Carrion
Carrion

Carrion: A Cartography of Roadkill
Runs through Oct. 2, Airspace, 4013 Chestnut St., 215-694-8719

Book artist Elysa Voshell ends her stint as a 40th Street artist-in-residence with this exhibition, which has a slightly misleading name. There aren't any dead animals, but "roadkill" is a somehow fitting way of describing her fragmented, eerie take on surveillance imagery and space. (The kind we move through, not the outer kind. Mostly.) On the walls, Google Earth photos of Philadelphia printed onto pages from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and blown-up shots of liver cells that look like satellite images; in the air, oddly arresting paper sculptures suspended with book-binding thread, like lightless lanterns, dried-up cocoons or the ghosts of organs.

-- Respond to this article.