Charley Friedman’s ‘Looking at the Sun’ at Gallery Diet.

Tonight will be as good night as any to kickstart the new year with art, and two of our more interesting galleries will help out.

Gallery Diet starts off 2015 with a solo exhibit from Charley Friedman, “Western Code.” The multimedia artist, based mostly in Brooklyn, has shown with the gallery several times before (this is his third outing), and uses humor to address various issues that can often divide us – cultural backgrounds, religion – through forms that includes large public sculptures, photography, video and drawing. That’s a rather appropriate theme to start a new year, and even more so in light of the tragedy involving exactly those very touchy subjects still unfolding in Paris.

According to the artist himself, his latest exhibit here in Miami tackles “my preoccupations with how individuals, nations and cultures form, and transmit ideas and values. How we perceive each other and ourselves, and how we invent systems to categorize our own egocentric worldview. The work is anchored in a particularly American or First World idiom: pop, minimal with a dash of consumerism.”

In the downtown space of Dimensions Variable, the artist-run gallery will be celebrating its fifth-year anniversary with a fundraiser and art auction. Over those handful of years, DV has let artists from Miami and as far away as Iceland pretty much do what they want with the revamped warehouse. Cuba-born, Miami-based Fabian Peña, for instance, just closed a show based loosely around the suffocating presence of propaganda both overt and subtle – he also happens to be one of our most interesting and talented sculptors. Over the summer, Berlin-based Goran Tomcic hung his spectacular, detailed Mylar-sequin curtains around the gallery. Just two examples of recent additions to the art scene that DV has provided.

Tonight it’s time to ring in another year of such offerings, with a party in the outdoor parking lot, with performances from 3PQ, Maritza Molina, Magnus Sigurdarson, the TM Sisters and Kevin Arrow, plus music thanks to Rat Bastard.

Charley Friedman’s “Western Code” opens at 6 p.m. at Gallery Diet, 174 N.W. 23rd St., Miami; www.gallerydiet.com. Dimensions Variable’s Five-Year Anniversary Fundraiser will take place from 7 p.m. to midnight at 100 N.E. 11th St., Miami; www.dimensionsvariable.net. Admission is $40.