Move over Piety Street Studios. The Music Box, aka Dithyrambalina, aka the Shantytown Sound Laboratory, was one of the highlights of contemporary art and musical collaborations in 2011. The Bywater installation was to be dismantled and another project was to begin on the lot, but those plans were postponed and the Music Box reopened in April. It's open weekends through June. It's just been announced that several bands will record at the site in June, including Japanther, Dark Dark Dark, Black Dice, Thurston Moore and Javelin. There will also be more concerts, like the one above, on June 8-9. The Music Box is to be dismantled afterward, or at least that's the current plan. There are more videos of activities at the Music Box on the New Orleans Airlift's YouTube page.

• Trophy Wife by Nikki Crook

These days we hear a lot about the “natural world,” but anyone who has spent much time in Louisiana sees aspects of nature that stretch the meaning of the word and provide fodder for the imagination. These paintings by Nikki Crook, Amy Guidry and Monique Ligons further the notion that dreams and fantasies may be the last vestige of wild nature in the modern psyche. Crook’s elegantly painted female nudes celebrate the link between the wild world and the dream world in works like Trophy Wife (pictured), featuring a darkly veiled woman offering a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a deer skull in the other. In The Hunter, a shapely if bloody young woman with a raccoon skin shawl draped across her head and shoulders confronts us with a skinned carcass in her outstretched arms, and Silent Forest features a bloody rabbit and an owl with a baby doll face — all of which suggest the female, regardless of species, may be the deadlier gender, at least some of the time.

Lafayette artist Guidry juxtaposes human and animal symbolism in weirdly surreal ways that are especially effective in works like Synergy, in which a human head emerges from the earth with blood vessels below like the root system of a tree. In others, wolves’ heads minus bodies roam the badlands like specters, suggesting the real predators may have moved on, perhaps to Wall Street. As with Crook, notions of interdependence and transference are implicit. Monique Ligons’ intricately baroque sci-fi style paintings extend the fantasy realm into the far reaches of the imagination in truly wild images where humanoid insects reenact Biblical scenes ranging from the Crucifixion to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. While not yet household names, all three artists are increasingly accomplished, and their extraordinary imaginations, deftly transposed to paint on canvas, make this dramatically offbeat show very appealing for anyone with an appreciation for magic realism.

Through June 2
Visions of the Unnatural World
Barrister’s Gallery, 2331 St. Claude Ave., 710-4506

Aesthetics is a complicated topic by almost any measure, but the aesthetics of distressed architecture — ratty old buildings — is a profoundly nuanced specialty. Most Americans don’t get it. To them, blight is blight and nothing more. To more fully appreciate surfaces that threaten to collapse under the weight of a prolonged gaze it helps to be, if not a native, then at least a long-term resident of Orleans Parish, and preferably a practicing artist or would-be artist — someone who understands that certain kinds of decay are actually signs of character. Local photorealist Shirley Rabe Masinter has been an accomplished connoisseur and painterly interpreter of urban blight for decades, and her current series of seedy commercial structures in various stages of decay reflects a profound understanding of the rich inner life of grotty old buildings. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “every wall is a door,” but for Masinter every wall is a palimpsest, a homely Rosetta Stone where the elemental histories of structures and their inhabitants are deeply etched into blistered and distressed surfaces.

Walter Patrolia’s Beer Parlor (pictured) is emblematic, a rotting two-story Faubourg Marigny wreck on which a recently exposed sign, revealed under layers of old siding, advertising both the bar and Jax Beer appears like an elegant East Asian tattoo on an gnarly old seafarer. The six-digit telephone number indicates it dates from at least the 1950s if not before, and we are left contemplating a scabrous heap of history that doubles as a time machine, a portal to another age. Masinter’s densely textured St. Roch Market, while gloriously ruinous, is less hopeful, a Hurricane Katrina casualty that has yet to be reborn. Others like the painting of the Shamrock Tavern, another excavation with a faded “Dixie 45” beer sign, or the dilapidated deco husk of the Standard Life building, are memento mori within the architectural still life that is New Orleans, reminders that darkness and death are what give meaning to light and life.

Through May 26
Made in Louisiana
LeMieux Galleries, 332 Julia St., 522-5988