Curated by Jamie Stevens

In her photographs, Josephine Pryde frequently stages determinedly pitched, inscrutable parodies of selfhood. For her first show in a US institution, she presents a series of roughly twenty newly created images of women’s hands in close encounters with their own bodies, as well as with touch screens and touch lamps. Held in suspended states of discovery, these hands are living it up, footloose and perhaps in the midst of one of the “lapses” of self-awareness suggested by the show’s title. Pryde manages subtle affectations in each scene, lampooning her caricatured subjects on an almost subliminal level. Note to Bay Area readers: If you get weary padding the hoof from photo to photo, you can hop a ride aboard Pryde’s miniature Union Pacific boxcar train, an interactive (yep . . .) sculpture barreling its way through the Wattis. Travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Sept. 16–Dec. 27.

— Jay Sanders