Follow the signs’ friendly blue walrus as it bounds from a Palace Avenue entrance, around a bend near the back corner of Milagro 139 and up a stairwell embossed with colorful clouds, black crows and sundry quotes, and you’ll find one of Santa Fe’s newest galleries. Go a little further and see that Eggman and Walrus—unlike its namesake song “I Am the Walrus,” which John Lennon wrote to thwart those looking for significance in The Beatles’ lyrics—is open to interpretation.

There’s often only a thin line between artistic process and gimmick. For Joanne Lefrak’s Past As Presence, the concepts are separate, but there’s quite a bit of both. Upon entering Box Gallery’s large, open space, the etchings on clear panels are nearly invisible and, when they are apparent, the etch marks themselves look like grease stains caught in the light.

Elemental’s three complementary photographers—Chris McCaw, Mitch Dobrowner and Edward Ranney—all focus on nature as their subject, but without an overt environmental message. A show that invokes earth, fire, wind, water and heart, however, can’t stray too far from the Planeteers’ territory—or from fear and love.

This year, when collectors flood in for Indian Market, casting countless shutter lenses, interpretations and intentions on Native art, it will be amid the ongoing celebration for the 400th anniversary of Santa Fe’s founding by Spanish colonialists.

We’ve all seen the graph before. It’s a line that spikes and plummets its way uphill from 1896—the year the Dow Jones industrial average was created—peaks in late 2007 and then declines the present day. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the mountain slopes in three of Wayne Thiebaud’s most recent paintings.

Art that examines how religion functions within our culture could do us a lot of good. Every psyche, however secular or even atheist, remains heavily populated with what Saul Bellow called “large numbers of highly individual ghosts”—and few of those are uninfluenced by prevailing religious beliefs.

Let me begin with the words of one contemporary philosopher: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Eighty-five years after Gatsby attempted to create himself purely from one pre-existing idea and a whole lot of money, the character feels as real and as heartbreaking as ever.

Art critics constantly get flak in this town for using a lot of $10 words. But, I mean, if you know the meaning of a word like “percipience”—even if “perceptiveness” works just as well—why not show it off?

I once knew a guy who, when he was on LSD, couldn’t handle being in nature. All that exaggeratedly twining, entangling growth was just too creepy for him, so he only took the drug in visually sanitized city spots, surrounded by concrete and steel.