Arts

What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week

By WILL HEINRICH and MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Nicola L.

Through Dec. 18. SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens; 718-361-1750, sculpture-center.org.

Works by Nicola L. at SculptureCenter in Queens. Kyle Knodell

In the 1960s, anthropomorphic sculpture in the style of furniture proliferated, suggesting a latent eroticism in home design. Despite the so-called “liberated” rhetoric of the era, however, most versions showed the female body in compromised positions, implying that women were as serviceable and accommodating as lamps or coffee tables. Nicola L.’s sculptures, surveyed in “Works, 1968 to the Present,” at SculptureCenter, offer a terrific and timely corrective.

Among the pieces here are a slick vinyl “White Foot Sofa” (1969), with slightly blobby toes, and an ironing table from 2004, cut from wood in the outline of a female body. “Little TV Woman: ‘I Am the Last Woman Object’” (1969) gets right to the point: The white vinyl sculpture looks like a blowup sex toy with a blankly abstracted mouth, breasts and genitals. A television embedded in its belly has text on its screen that reads: “I am the last woman object. You can take my lips, touch my breasts, caress my stomach, my sex. But I repeat it, it is the last time.”

“I Am the Last Woman Object’” (1969), by Nicola L. Kyle Knodell

Gender parity is suggested in the more recent “Penetrables” series. Here, you could stick your arms, legs and head into sleeves sewn into a sheet of vinyl, like donning a second skin or alternative identity. At SculptureCenter, the metallic silver “Giant Penetrable (Moon),” from 2012, and the yellow “Giant Penetrable (Sun),” from 2012, hang limply on the wall, decommissioned from interactive use.

But you get the point. Like everything here, the “Penetrables” offer a curious, alluring, canny and uncanny approach to the human body. Yes, this physique is a beautiful aesthetic form, but for women, that has often meant being objectified or debased.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Kelly Akashi

Through Dec. 18. SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens; 718-361-1750, sculpture-center.org.

An installation view of “Feel Me,” one of Kelly Akashi’s works, also being shown at SculptureCenter. Kyle Knodell/Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

The basement of SculptureCenter proposes a challenge to artists. Divided into narrow passageways by heavy walls, the space offers a series of nooks for displaying art at unusual viewer proximity. Kelly Akashi occupies it with aplomb in “Long Exposure,” her current exhibition.

Glass, bronze and wax sculptures sit on ad hoc brick shelves or on wooden supports that resemble Ikea end tables. Some of the glass works look like spores or futuristic organisms; some of the candles do creepy things like spiral around a tree branch. A few bronze body parts crop up: human hands, fingers and such. The work might be described as restrained-psychedelic or an art-craft-science experiment from the 1960s, retooled for the present.

“Image of a Thing” (2017) by Ms. Akashi. Kyle Knodell/Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

What makes Ms. Akashi’s presentation noticeably contemporary, in addition to its resemblance to Carol Bove’s early work, is that, as the title of the exhibition suggests, photography is used as a guiding logic — particularly, its digital form. Ms. Akashi started as a photographer, and a suite of classically black-and-white photograms is installed in a corner of the basement. Each coyly titled “Image of a Thing,” the amoeba-like photograms have a formal similarity to sculpture.

It goes further than this, though. In the era of 3-D printing, flatness and volume are closer than ever on a continuum. A picture on a screen can quickly morph into a sculpture, and vice versa. Plants are now like photographs or sculptures, too: They’re engineered by humans just as often as they “naturally” occur. Ms. Akashi’s exhibition functions as a dusky symbolic and underground laboratory for exploring some of these ideas.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Travess Smalley

Through Dec. 23. Foxy Production, 2 East Broadway, Manhattan; 212-239-2758, foxyproduction.com.

Travess Smalley starts by drawing loosely arboreal forms on paper, simple networks of tapering strokes that curl out from one or two central nodes. He achieves two distinct tones of gray and black with a single ink, simply because the mark gets darker where the strokes overlap. Twenty-seven of these old-fashioned drawings, hanging in a grid, constitute a mesmerizing meditation on that deadly post-internet idea, “content generation.” Each unique pattern has roughly an even split between inked image and blank paper, and they’re all as interchangeable as fresh dollar bills.

“Toad-skep” (2017), by Travess Smalley, one of his works at Foxy Production. Foxy Production

Instead of becoming infatuated with the empty purity of his algorithm, though, Mr. Smalley remembers to treat it as a means to an organic end. In several large prints based on similar drawings, a complicated process of scanning, coloring, rescanning and controlled Photoshop degradation imparts a beguiling psychedelic life to misty digital pixelation. (There is still, however, the usual melancholy suggestion of a species rapidly outpacing itself with its own tools.)

“Wigmaker” (2017), by Mr. Smalley. Foxy Production

The range of greens in “Toad-skep” evokes growing tendrils of some nonspecific variety before shading into molten orange and crimson. “Wigmaker,” a kelp-like maze of lavenders, should be guarding some naiad’s door, and the fiery violet and green curlicues of “Fool’s Mythmaker” look as if they were lifted from Cardinal Richelieu’s embroidered jacket for the Académie Française.

WILL HEINRICH