Eight years after his solo debut at White Cube in London, the work of Cerith Wyn Evans—a fixture in European galleries and museums—finally arrived in the United States at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It was worth the wait, as I discovered as soon as I came face-to-face with the five-foot-wide concave mirror (Inverse, Reverse, Perverse, 1996) that is the show’s curtain-raiser. The title refers to the three reflections one encounters when approaching the work: from a distance of about four feet, an upside-down, warped view of the visual field; a step closer, a blown-up image of one’s torso,

The twenty-six photographic series that Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov made between the late 1960s and 2002 (all but three of which are represented in this exhibition) include several varieties of homemade antidote to official Soviet visual culture as well as negotiations—some shaky, some masterful—with the many new “freedoms” of the post-Soviet world. Though the series vary enormously in format, technique, and strategy, Mikhailov’s interests in the individual rather than the type, immediacy rather than distance, and the everyday rather than the ceremonial remain constant