opening States of Mind Allan McCollum’s psychogeography, at Petzel and in Central Park. “My relationship to Missouri and Kansas is—well, like most of us from the coast, they’re the states we fly over," says Allan McCollum. “We think of them more as shapes than as places.” A California native who resides in New York, he’s long been interested in the way that certain forms imprint themselves on viewers—the political map as Rorschach test. In his “Recognizable Image Drawings” at Petzel, he challenges New Yorkers to assign meaning to the silhouettes of counties in the flyover states. They’re paired with works from his “Perpetual Photos” series of the early eighties, blurry enlargements of artworks glimpsed in the background of television shows. “One room is about recognizable things, and the other is about unrecognizable things,” the artist says. (Another set of works by McCollum, large sculptures from his series “Perfect Vehicles,” goes on view this week in the southeast corner of Central Park.) The drawings are black-and-white, but it’s difficult, in this season, to look at Kansas and Missouri without seeing red—an issue McCollum is well aware of. “The cross between a political and a geographical shape is really interesting to me,” he says. “I get hypnotized looking at the electoral map.” • Friedrich Petzel, 535 W. 22th St., 212-680-9467. 9/1-10/2. • Central Park, Southeast corner, 9/8-2/28.