A faceted crystal paperweight with engraved letters spelling out the dates and title of this exhibition sits atop a stack of pink, marbleized stationery. Arp-like but ultimately practical marks—part of a printed map of the gallery—are visible through the clear object, which is in fact a sculpture by Bedros Yeretzian, Mutual Enemy Arousal Souvenir: ‘Ma,’ Chateau Shatto, 12/10/16—01/14/17, 2016, signaling that the informational and the aesthetic will comingle throughout the exhibition.

This perversity of proximity is understated, but prevalent in works by Fiona Connor, who also organized the show. In her Ma #1 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point) and Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point) (both 2016) Connor inlays fragments of the titular painter’s former Southern California home in the walls of the gallery. These literal intrusions of context into the space of the exhibition complicate the internal harmonies of the abstract McLaughlin artwork they face, #13, 1964, a nearly symmetrical, black-and-white, geometric oil painting.

Distinctions between form and context collapse in Audrey Wollen’s nearby video Objects or Themselves, 2015, which links, via a voice-over narrative, the suffragette Mary Richardson’s slashing of Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, 1647–51, with the artist’s own experiences during invasive cancer treatment. Touches are violent here—a cleaver meeting the Venus’s torso, or ribs removed along with a tumor—but the charge of contact remains. In Wollen’s words: “Maybe I find myself not an either Mary or Venus, but in the very moment where they collide, skin to blade to image, where two trajectories of womanhood meet in one blissful rupture.”

— David Muenzer