Cedric Michael Cox makes use of Cincinnati's ornamental Italianate architecture and gritty textures in city-themed paintings. Urban Rapture, at the Carnegie in Covington, exaggerates the geometry of the city, color-coding it in brilliant reds, golds and blue-greens borrowed from luminous stained glass windows. Through Feb. 19.  

Cincinnati’s vibrant community of alternative-exhibition spaces is my first love in this area. I am boastful of the innovations I witness in these unlikely places, where I not only exhibit my own installations but also, in several cases, help organize and curate exhibitions.   

Opening this Friday at the Weston Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts are three solo projects: Alice Pixley Young’s Nightfall, Steve Zieverink’s Live Station, and paintings and wall drawings by Rick Mallette. While Young’s installations deal with nostalgia and memory, Zieverink’s creative process takes into account our ever-progressing technologies and how these new frontiers affect not just aesthetics but biology, personal identity and other basic building blocks of the human experience. Through Feb. 28.  

Fabricate opened just a few weeks ago inside Northside’s Red Polly furniture store. As a mixture of art gallery and handmade craft shop, it has already shown good taste in culling real treasures from the local DIY community. This Saturday it will premiere a project called Made In Cincinnati that offers insight into the creative processes of local fashion designers at University of Cincinnati’s DAAP program. Through Jan. 9.  

Aeqai, a free, online journal of art criticism that looks at contemporary art in and near Cincinnati is celebrating its one-year anniversary this Friday from 5:30-8 p.m. with “Talk and Quaff,” a benefit mixer at the Weston Gallery in downtown’s Aronoff Center for the Arts with food and art-world company.  

It’s not that the gently, lazy shimmering music of Baby Alpaca does not in itself evoke imagery of a dreamland through atmospheric layering of sounds and descriptive lyricism, but on Monday a fully realized video vision of the music will be premiered at the Contemporary Arts Center. The song “Vodka Lemonade” is a lolling prescription for escapism, camaraderie and feasts of cocktails and recreational drugs. 7-11 p.m.  

Having Country Club's West End gallery space in walking distance of my home was a luxury I didn’t fully appreciate until it moved across town to Oakley. But while it's now further away from downtown and many like-minded arts organizations, it is worth the trek.  

Country Club, now located on the second floor above the high-end design store Voltage in Oakley, is exhibiting a large number of paintings by Aaron Morse in Kingdom of Nature. His works are joined by a bright collection of ceramic works by the duo Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis, which, all things considered, works well. Through Dec. 19.  

Dania Eliot is producing video shorts every day on her blog “A Movie A Day” (dania-amovieaday.blogspot.com). Eliot’s videos, ranging in duration from several seconds to around a minute, offer large conceptual returns on small investments of time for viewers.  

Columbus is not too far away to drive to see an evening of performance art that eases into modern dance. This weekend go to see Anthro(pop)ology, a variety show that has invited three different groups to critique and consider the positive, negative and ambiguous effects of pop culture in society.