This week’s gallery picks explore communication through patterns and symbols.

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1. This epic show takes Kazimir Malevich’s radical painting of a black square – first shown in Russia 100 years ago – as the emblem of a new art and a new society. The exhibition features over 100 artists who took up its legacy. Their paintings, photographs and sculptures symbolize Modernism’s utopian aspirations and breakdowns at White Chapel Gallery
2. Diedrick Brackens’ frenetic textiles combine painting and sculpture, West African weaving and European tapestry, blunder and intention, domesticity and the wilderness of the imagination at Johansson Projects
3. Artist and filmmaker Thomas Campbell is internationally known for his artwork combining colorful renderings of figurative characters against bold graphic backdrops and a vocabulary of positive affirmations scrawled in a unique stylistic hand that often results in profound and inspiring views of human nature at Bolinas Museum
4. Hayal Pozanti has created a cipher system, titled “Instant Paradise,” whereby numbers and letters from the English language are replaced by her own iconic alphabet. Through this encryption, Pozanti’s works explore the polemics of communication, examining the privatization of information and the dissemination of data in the Internet age at Jessica Silverman Gallery
5. Hadieh Shafie layers thousands of strips of hand painted paper, which are the rolled into schools and placed within a frame or stacked flat. Persian words like eshgh (“love”) are inscribed and often concealed within the layers of paper, referencing the meditating practices of Sufism at Leila Heller Gallery
6. Mossy Cloak, curated by Third Object, is a group exhibition of work in photography, painting, sound and sculpture from six artists. It examines the layered vocabularies of camouflage, exploring its role as a visual surface patterning and as metaphor for social and historical concealment at Roots & Culture