Images straight from the pages of Italian Vogue, W, and Harper's Bazaar have made it onto the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in the institution's first show of fashion photography. Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990 opens April 16 at MoMA's temporary digs in Long Island City and brings together approximately one hundred photographs by thirteen sharpshooters from Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Nan Goldin to Steven Meisel, Cindy Sherman and Juergen Teller. The latest in a steady stream of contemporary fashion-meets-art exhibitions in recent years, the show focuses on the influence of filmic strategies (as in diCorcia's 2000 "Cuba Libre" spread for W, which chronicles a young woman's meanderings through Havana) and the unpolished snapshot (think Teller).

Coinciding with the release of their new book, "It's a Project" (Booth-Clibborn and Abrams), which comes in a bag of goodies that they've designed, the girl band phenomenon Chicks on Speed have taken over Deitch Projects' Wooster Street gallery. The multi-talented group-cum-conceptual-brand has turned its preparation for two live performances at the space into a process installation of sewing/screenprinting stations, thrift shop finds, fabric bolts and neon spray paint as they craft their way toward the final act on April 16 & 17.

One of the most adroit young painters around, Alex Brown deconstructs found images and puts them back together, reprocessing them as richly-patterned, elusively coherent canvases of reiterated fragmentation. Previously, he's dissolved landscapes and portraits into fractured colors and shapes determined by some indiscernible geometric logic. And for his current show, at Feature, Brown has assimilated two unrelated images into one, not so much layering them as breaking them down into the shards, blots and jigsaw shapes that they now share. Squint a little, and a portrait of T Rex band member Marc Bolan transforms into the living room set of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Or dance diva Dee Roberts gives way to the interior of an opera house. Existing somewhere between a Rorschach test and a SIRDS image—those posters in which, if you stare long enough, three dimensional forms pop out of seemingly random dots—these are optical illusions transfixed by painterly skill that heighten the experience of seeing.

Infatuated by music and the culture that surrounds it, Jim Lambie—who represented Scotland at last year's Venice Biennale—creates installations that don't overtly reference his rocker side but instead capture its more trippy, feel-good spirit. The on-the-rise artist has a compulsion for covering floors and stairs in dizzying strips of vinyl tape and, with rolls and rolls of it in hand, has transformed Anton Kern gallery into an Op Art-worthy hideout inhabited by assemblages of paisley-covered tires, sequined tube tops, and handbags and pleather pants encrusted with pieces of broken mirror. As pop-culture detritus possessing a near-talismanic seductiveness, these objects could stand on their own. But embedded within the striped extravaganza—and surrounded by images of watchful eyes connected by a synaptic network of still more tape—they become part of an off-beat, high-gloss terrain that translates a punk sensibility into something more finely tuned.