Merge Gallery

If you are going to write a play about star-crossed lovers, you had better have something new to say. Rifka Milder wrestles with a similar challenge in her attempts to bring a new sensibility to a potentially overused subject. In her solo show “Reflections,” Milder goes where many artists have gone before—Central Park. The born-and-bred New Yorker often paints on-site or from a photograph, and this series depicts paintings of the reflections she saw in a pond in Central Park and in the fountain in a building lobby. Fat blue, green, and pink brush-strokes skitter in circles around the canvas, like rocks skipping across a lake. The thickly applied paint makes the work appear wet—the canvases are shiny like the glistening surface of water. But the emotive brushwork is coupled with out-of-place renderings of fish and ducks. It is as if Milder could not decide between abstraction and representation, so she decided to paint a little bit of both. When paired with the brightly colored paint, the marine creatures add a whisper of kitsch to the work. Milder’s own name, it seems, is an apt description of her mild musings on the ponds of Central Park.

Chambers Fine Art

Swords, dramatic makeup, suspenseful music, murdered citizens—while all these things may sound like the ingredients of a blockbuster horror movie, they are in fact the components of Chinese-born Wang Jianwei’s exhibit at Chambers Fine Art, “Three Way Fork in the Road.” Jianwei’s 15-minute film captures two sword-bearing figures, reminiscent of performers at the Peking Opera, circling around a cast of actors. The actors do not notice the warriors—they are too busy eating a variety of foods. A female businesswoman in a peach suit hurriedly consumes rice from a Styrofoam container while a man in ragged clothes hungrily devours a dumpling on a stick. A man in a lab coat examines a piece of fish under a microscope before slipping it between his lips. The mood becomes more and more ominous as the music—a drum beat that recalls the ticking of a clock, or a bomb—gets louder and faster. Suddenly, the warriors brandish their swords and the hungry civilians collapse in a heap. Jianwei presents us with a society so absorbed by consumption that it ignores everything going on around it. He couples his film with a group of photographs of the same performance. One photograph, shot dramatically from above, shines a spotlight on the scene of the collapsed civilians—it is as if Jianwei is shining a flashlight to expose something we are not supposed to see.

Stephen Haller Gallery

If you walked by a gallery and saw a series of monochromatic striped canvases through the window, would you keep walking? Johnnie Winona Ross’s paintings look remarkably uninteresting from behind glass. But step a little closer, and what looks at first like pleasant wallpaper will sharpen into a complex, variegated landscape of color and form. Ross’s paintings are quiet. The installation “San Solomon Seeps” includes 15 works that vary dramatically in size (they run the gamut from 72 inches to 10 inches), but only subtly in color. A grid of thick white stripes lies overtop faint compositions of blue, pink, or tan. Streaks of blue or pink drip down the front of the canvas like evenly spaced teardrops peeking out from behind the strident white grid. Ross polishes his surfaces with a pueblo pottery stone to give them a pearly sheen. Staring at one of his canvases can produce a dizzying effect—the slight variations in color behind the bars makes it look like the ever-shifting surface of a pool. Ross’s canvases do not shout from across the street, or even from across the room. But if you get close enough, you can hear them quietly hum.