The New York Times
A Grand Finale of Group Show Fireworks
By ROBERTA SMITH
CANADA
"You Are My Sunshine, You Is My Sunshine," at Canada on the Lower East Side, also has its finger on the pulse, albeit with some dirt under the fingernails. Devoted to artwork and mixed tapes by musician-artists and artist-musicians, it maps the current proximity of contemporary art and music, pinpointing collage, or sampling, as a major connecting link. It teems with an anarchic, do-it-yourself spirit, visible in the drawings of the musicians from the band Caroliner; the collages and handmade books of Brian Belott (which find an exact aural equivalent in his musical combinations of found sound); the fairy-tale drawings of Tara Burke, who records as Fursaxa; and Jocelyn Shipley.
Michael Mahalchick, an artist and a member of the band Experimental Makeup, who is somewhat marginalized in the Greene Naftali show, makes a stronger impression here with one of his outrageous fabric sculptures; it is both a garment and a kind of body at once. The standouts here are a wall of often scratched and gouged Polaroids by Tim Rutili mostly taken while touring with his band, Califone, and the small, eccentric ink drawings of Devendra Banhart, whose CD "Oh Me Oh My the Way the Day Goes By the Sun Is Setting Dogs Are Dreaming Lovesongs of the Christmas Spirit" (Young God Records) was a surprise indie hit last year.
Mr. Banhart's drawings, which also appear on his CD covers, depict simple images like simple houses and clusters of little hands that have the intimacy and spirituality of present-day ex-votos.