Vadim Fiškin makes art. “Well,” you might ask, “so what else is new?” As empty as the statement may sound, it really encapsulates Fiškin’s practice: His objects and installations look as simple and blunt as that sentence, and they are similarly mystifying. The works featured in his recent show “Light Matters 2” are little ontological riddles, impossibilities, feats of logic-defying causality, at once images and reflections on imagemaking and its conditions. The installation miss Christmas, 2012, for example, is nothing but the shadow of a black palm tree growing out of a paint can. But there’s

Is that a grin or a rictus? The kooky, bug-eyed faces that leer from the eighteen oil paintings in this exhibition raise the question more than once. Ellen Gronemeyer’s first solo exhibition in New York was titled with the German word Affentheater, or “ape theater,” the name for traveling shows popular in the second half of the nineteenth century in which trained monkeys were dressed in human clothes and made to perform acrobatics and imitate human behavior. Accordingly, the cartoonlike figures in her paintings imply discomfort, as if they had been painfully wrenched into their circumstances of