Those who have already made their way through the crush at P.S.1’s recently unveiled “Greater New York 2005” may have glimpsed Abigail Lazkoz’s wall drawing in the second-floor stairwell. Monya Rowe gallery, however, is offering a scaled-down, intimate selection of black-and-white drawings by the Brooklyn transplant. Working within the spirit of her earlier projects—which adopted a mixed classical and contemporary visual verbiage to activate and update the problems surrounding questionable social values—Lazkoz’s five new ink-on-paper drawings take up an Escheresque, geometrical formalism that discombobulates scenes whose narratives already foretell a latent anxiety. She here explores problems of individual identity through the lens of cultural unease. The literalness of her figures’ outsized, blocky bodies suggests a sense of personal struggle; fears of belonging, responsibility, and communication are only exacerbated by each character’s position on either side of a chasm, negotiating a battlefield or treetop, or tumbling down a mine shaft. The compositions’ most critical disruption concerns the notion that, despite their gridded exteriors, these bodies cannot chart their own disordered inner worlds.

— Nicole Rudick