Gabríela Fridriksdóttir, Daniel Hesidence, and Will Ryman

Tracy Williams, Ltd.’s West Village townhouse is a cozy setting for this three-person show, which revolves around various twisted takes on the human form. On the ground floor, Will Ryman stumbles into a Hallmark moment, pitchfork in hand, in his installation depicting an archetypal family dinner. Made from Sculpey, wire and PVC, among other materials, his figures and objects straddle the defunct aesthetic of Eastern Bloc animation and the persuasive charms of toy-store displays. A jokey suspension of disbelief seems to linger in the room as a pudgy Wolf Blitzer glares from a Sculpey TV, the family pet ogles an insect with a ravenous eye, and a dark figure crawls out of the fireplace. Upstairs, Gabríela Fridriksdóttir’s mythological world of bodily functions bubbles and simmers; in her video installation, brown liquid is prepared and then consumed by the slime-covered artist, as the camera hovers close. Her two-dimensional pieces on brown-painted walls broach the same subject from a slightly more ambiguous vantage point. In another room on the second floor is Volume 13 of the Whole, 2001, a series of paintings by Daniel Hesidence that snakes along the walls, each and every work obsessively depicting a female head. Inside and outside seem to melt into each other in these paintings as brain-matter turns into hairdo and mucus membranes into makeup. For all their visceral messiness, the works maintain a humorous and skeptical tone, time and again modifying the descriptive attributes of their subject, as its creator starts painting “that girl” all over again.