At first glance, I believed Sharon Core’s works to be slick oil paintings, specifically an homage to the 17th-century Flemish still life. There are ripened fruits and fanciful ceramics arranged carefully on neutral surfaces, all rendered with painstaking detail.

Since becoming SFR's art critic I’ve seen almost 150 shows, drank 4,000 plastic cups of chardonnay and written 20 reviews covering 23 different venues. In the fading sunlight of the calendar year, I began flipping through my official Critic’s Notebook (99 cents, Walgreens) to reflect on these past five months.

Christmas is a weird time to go to art galleries. On the one hand, there are spaces that continue with regularly scheduled programs and risk seeming indifferent to Santa’s birthday. And then there are the galleries that attempt to capitalize on the spirit of the season and the extra foot traffic by hosting a holiday-themed show—ugh. There is already a year-round, holiday-themed exhibition. It’s called the mall.

Mountains and oceans are favorite subjects in the arts. As far as I can tell, this is solely because they are really, really big. Unless you are an astronaut, mountains and oceans are the largest things on which you will ever lay eyes. So I found it strange that Bernd Haussmann’s paintings of mountains and oceans are not only small, but also devoid of discernible labor.

Double Entendre, Fay Ku’s exhibition at Eight Modern, is a crowd-pleaser. Or maybe just a crowd-teaser. Or maybe I’m a pervert. Whichever it is, I was left wanting more, both for the beauty of the art and, at only six drawings, the brevity of the show.

Frank Buffalo Hyde illustrates the cross-contamination of his Native heritage with pop culture icons. A typical composition includes a depiction of a Native figure or artifact juxtaposed with a mass-produced object, often dessert, floating amid a field of dots or bright color.

Graphite on Paper, the two-person show at James Kelly Contemporary, delivers on its promise, though the ratio of paper-to-graphite is strikingly disproportionate. The artists, Susan York and Wes Mills, each employ a restrained approach to mark making, but the similarities end there.

Mapping a Green Future presents issues that are universal—such as carbon emissions, pollution and depletion of resources—but it does a good job of examining them in a way that feels specific to the viewer, either by assessing the impact at the local level or by narrowing the focus of the data to the individual level.

How is it some people, operating under much more oppressive regimes than, say, an ad agency, can transcend mediocrity to design something original and beautiful?The Polish Poster: Paradox, Metaphor and Symbolism doesn’t answer this question. It simply demonstrates that good design can last well beyond its intended commercial purpose.

There are two kinds of landscapes to photograph: the ones we’ve messed up by living all over them, and the ones we’re destroying in absentia. Manmade: Notions of Landscape from the Lannan Collection focuses primarily on the former, while Selections from True: Photographs by Thomas Joshua Cooper presents the latter, with images from the Earth’s shrinking poles.