What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in April


This week in Newly Reviewed, Martha Schwendener covers Camp’s probing videos, Mungo Thomson’s recirculating images and John Zorn’s drawings and objects.

Midtown

Through July 20. Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; 212-708-9400, moma.org.

The grandest work in the show, “Bombay Tilts Down” (2022), is a multi-screen video made during the pandemic using a closed-circuit television camera mounted on the 35th floor of a building in the middle of Mumbai (sometimes called by its former name, Bombay). From dawn to dusk, the camera pans over modern buildings, but also low-income settlements covered in tarp and brick. Another work, presented on a series of monitors, features villagers in different locations gathering around screens in a rich tradition of storytelling.

My favorite work is “From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf” (2013), an 83-minute video compiled from camcorder and cellphone videos made by sailors traversing the Indian Ocean. The clips show them working, playing cards and attending festivals on land, and the piece as a whole becomes a slice-of-life document that feels both timeless and contemporary.

What really makes this show, though, is the music, including a the soundtrack to “Bombay Tilts Down” by BamBoy (Tushar Adhav) and the popular songs accompanying the sailors on their odysseys. The music here harks back to old Bollywood scores — a reminder that when cameras were combined with sound, their ubiquity and impact was cemented. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

East Village

Through April 26. Karma, 22 East Second Street and 188 East Second Street; 212-390-8290, karmakarma.org.

Well before artificial intelligence images flooded our lives, more straightforward photographs, film and videos amassed at their own fevered clip. Not long after the technical innovations that made them possible, there were so many images that we didn’t know what to do with them.

Artists and thinkers like Aby Warburg, Andre Malraux, Frank Mouris, Harun Farocki and Camille Henrot examined and cataloged images. Mungo Thomson has developed his own system, rephotographing images in vintage instructional manuals, nature guides and art history textbooks. These are presented in rapid-fire succession as stop-motion animation videos — essentially animating Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century still images of human and animal “locomotion” — and accompanied with mostly experimental soundtracks.

A Universal Picture” and “Time Life,” spread over two Karma locations, are stellar collections of these videos and more. Here are images from guides to hummingbirds and seashells, instruction manuals for playing guitar and throwing pottery on the wheel, and art history books. Accompanying the images are sounds and scores by John McEntire, Eiko Ishibashi, Lee Ranaldo, Mark Fell and Will Guthrie, as well as György Ligeti’s 1962 “Poème Symphonique.” The flicker effect of the images and expertly synced sound is oddly relaxing — the opposite of doom-scrolling.

Down the street in another gallery, nearly blank covers of Time magazine, with their distinctive red border, are silk-screened onto a series of mirrors (Time being, of course, one of the biggest purveyors of photographs before the internet). Stand in the middle of the room, between the mirrors, and your image is reflected to infinity.

With this work, the show’s title becomes clear: “Universal picture” is a farce. Every single photo ever made is programmed by an apparatus and replete with ideology. Therefore, if billions of images are uploaded to social media (alone) every day, Thomson’s exercise in painstakingly recuperating, rephotographing and recirculating a few thousand images helps explain, in part, why the world feels so crazy these days. We’re drowning in images. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Soho

Through May 11. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.

The drawings and diminutive objects in “John Zorn: Hermetic Cartography” at the Drawing Center are redolent of Asian calligraphy, mystical writings and wisps of smoke. Above all, they’re full of movement, which makes sense since Zorn is best known as an avant-garde composer.

Evidence of that is everywhere. You feel the echoes of Dada in “My Wife Remodeled” (1972), a little collage made from ticket stubs. And there are references to other avant-garde composers: John Cage’s poetic approach to musical notation, along with Zorn’s “Hymen 2” (1973), which pays homage to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Hymnen,” only Zorn’s instructions to the woodwind musicians was to “blow their guts out.”

A darkened room devoted to Zorn’s 1970s “Theater of Musical Optics” includes meticulous arrangements of tiny found objects used in these séance-like presentations; they also resemble idiosyncratic Fluxus boxes and chess sets. Zorn was obsessed with the cartoon music of Carl Stalling — known for his “Looney Tunes” scores — and notations here include cutout comics with sounds like “Womp!” and “Thud!”

A series of performances accompanies this show. At the one I attended, Zorn directed by holding up letters and numbers, and the musicians would respond. As with the drawings and objects in the show, there was a sense of rigor mixed with improvisation and play: a refreshing reminder that when chance and experimentation are a significant part of the process, anything can happen. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Lower East Side

Through April 13. Dracula’s Revenge, 105 Henry Street; 203-517-8385, draculasrevenge.net.

In this elegant show by the Romanian artist Anna-Bella Papp, four clay slabs, each about 13 inches by 10 inches and one inch thick, are arranged on blond wood Ikea shelves. They’re as precisely, inseparably installed as four frames of a film. Each bears a high-contrast image of a wrought-iron fence. From left to right, the view starts with a flower, then gradually pulls back to show more of the ironwork.

As information emerges, so does distance. If you were to imagine a narrative, it could be as simple as: The metal bloom catches the artist’s eye, then the artist notices that the whole fence is made of these springy curlicues — a revelation that’s joyful, since the more the merrier, but also cut with loss, since that first flower is not so special after all.

Papp works almost exclusively in clay slabs like these, always laid flat. For this group, the images are pressed into a thin layer of powder blue clay on top of a gray base, then the relief is filled smooth with milky white. The white on powder blue recalls a classic Wedgewood china pattern. Here the effect is wispy and waxy, and the sculptures feel almost animated.

The show hinges on the tension produced by small decisions, like the slabs’ tantalizing closeness to the wall: Shouldn’t they be on it? But the slabs, for all their earthy weightiness, feel fragile, bound by impossibly sharp edges. You may also notice the color variation, a clue that the two outer panels are baked ceramic, while the middle two are unfired. The idea of moving them seems treacherous. Papp’s show is cryptic and evasive in a way that doesn’t need solving. TRAVIS DIEHL

Lower East Side

Through April 26. Entrance Gallery, 48 Ludlow Street; 646-838-5188, entrance.nyc.

Playful new watercolors by Amanda Rodriguez in her debut solo show depict unlikely transmogrifications between animals, humans and inanimate objects that loop back on each other, forming a macabre cosmic wheel.

In the upstairs gallery, 16 square paintings run around the walls on a shelf. Between every pair of legible illustrations is a strange blend of the two. A stunned deer in headlights morphs into a lobster over the course of three panels; the deer’s star-struck blue eyes become the rubber bands binding the lobster’s claws. Two panels later, we have a lobster dinner. Phase through a woman at her toilette, a worm on a hook, a fish, a host of Gothic angels. And, finally, a red car striking a deer — which brings us full circle.

Downstairs, arched paintings work a quasi-Christian sense of narrative stained-glass windows or altarpieces into the layouts of pinball machines. In one, a central figure lugs sacks of cans and bottles rendered as colorful daubs; yellow pinball bumpers are decorated with a handgun or subway car doors closing. It’s a fairly romanticized picture of life in New York City, percussive shots and cries depicted as gossamer clichés.

Another watercolor echoes the transformations upstairs in a central rosette, showing a baby growing up, transforming into a fish-person, getting married and having a human baby of their own. While the details feel churning and random, the larger picture has a satisfying cyclical shape. TRAVIS DIEHL

Noho

Through April 5. Marinaro, 678 Broadway; 212-989-7700, marinaro.biz.

The gallery has the aura of a city park, equal parts hospitable and estranging. That feeling comes from Kianja Strobert’s bench sculptures, arranged in rows and alcoves, inferring a social structure you intuitively understand and want to respect. The benches, wood and papier-mâché at their core, are forbiddingly painted with leaden silver gloop but invitingly unpristine.

Piles of refuse litter the seats, as do blankets, fresh clothes and trinkets like pearls and barbells and a votive candle. Colorful pages from home décor magazines and a retro-looking 2024 calendar of flowers pop against the uniform gray. A paper shopping bag labeled Medium Brown Bag, like those from Bloomingdale’s, is encased in clear vinyl and sits on the end of one bench like someone just forgot it.

And, as with many ostensibly public urban spaces, there’s tension: One bench, “Untitled #10,” is laced with saw-toothed strips resembling the kind of hostile architectural interventions meant to keep the huddled masses moving. Next to them is an elongated photo of a woman’s legs. The benches are deployed with qualified generosity, like casting pearls before swine — a contradiction compounded in the gallery because it’s unclear if you may sit on them.

The triple lines of draped pewter-hued flags in “Bunting,” a papier-mâché wall work set above — what else — a bench, offer another counterpoint, a surge of celebration. It’s like the city, after all: a harsh buffet. The benches benefit from their arrangement, the cross-references of the possible plots. As a whole lot, the scene is twee apocalypse; it’s hard to imagine a single sculpture having the same resonance. TRAVIS DIEHL

See the March gallery shows here.



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