Nathan McKee and Ryan Bubnis’s In Plane Sight, a show in Chef Projects’ main gallery, seeks to elevate everyday objects by paying them unusual attention in paintings and paper cutouts. Accompanying the show is Looking & Seeing, a sidecar show with a similar focus, curated by McKee and Bubnis, of works from four local artists—Brianna Spencer, Erik Railton, Lori Damiano, and Violet Aveline. Everyone involved shares a history in skateboarding. “Skate eyes” is the term they coined to articulate the unique vision—a unifying, subcultural point of view—that comes with having spent years viewing the world through the lens of a skateboarder.

Parallax is looking to fashion to close out the year. Garments are one of the many creative endeavors that live at the intersection of art and craft, with many designers choosing to go in both directions, often simultaneously. This show, curated by Rhonda P. Hill, a fashion analyst and advocate for equality within the industry, chooses to highlight the conscious decision to make art from clothes. Showcasing the work of nine international designers (Kyle Denman, Isabella Diorio, Korina Emmerich, Karen Glass, Alena Kalana, Ruree Lee, Maital Levitan, Abiola Onabule, and Yun Qu), Cloth, Construct, Culture highlights narrative within fashion design as a force of cultural influence, an art form capable of affecting change.

The experimental Pearl District gallery ILY2 assembled works from 10 artists around the word “body”: which contexts do we appropriate the word for, and how do they stretch our relationship to our own literal bodies? Portland’s Pace Taylor, who has an upcoming solo show across town at Nationale in January, is showing two new works whose intimate pastel portraits capture intensely human emotions across gender, sexuality, and neurodivergent stories. The Charleston, South Carolina–based photographer Dylan Beckman is showing several works from her Ersatz Goods series, which probes at the fraught dialectic between replication and authenticity.

The holiday party approach at Russo Lee serves up art from its roster of 42 artists spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper. That roster includes everyone from Portland painter Julian Gaines, known for depicting scenes of Black history and modern culture, to the Washington-based ceramic artist Richard Notkin, whose often politically-engaged, incredibly detailed sculptures are in the permanent collections of both the MET and the Smithsonian. There’s no telling what will make it into the show, which is kind of the fun of it.