The end of a night like any other, facedown on the bar with a cigarette turning to ash between two fingers, singing a perfectly acceptable rendition of the aria “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion before your head deflates and everything goes dark. We’ve all been there, right?

This blackout into canonical bathos is the repeated fate of the computer-animated protagonist of Ed Atkins’s video work Ribbons, 2014, the centerpiece of his recent solo exhibition, a triptych of simultaneously projected roughly thirteen-minute-long video works. These played on a synced loop along the back wall

Though not quite a retrospective, this judiciously focused presentation, primarily composed of Hannah Wilke’s object work in sculpture and related drawings, implied the continued scope of the artist’s percolating influence some twenty years after her death. Copied onto a gallery wall at the exhibition’s entrance, her moving, ambitious text A Letter to Women Artists, 1975, set the tone: “I want to overwhelm you. I want to touch your feelings . . . Feel the folds.”

Here, those folds, those little pieces of nature, as she called them, were grouped according to material, the major curatorial focus

Establishing a studio in a Nissen hut in Cornwall, UK, allowed Simon Carroll (1964–2009) the opportunity to begin making drawings the size of a soccer field with specially adapted rakes on the nearby beaches. These gigantic drawings, eventually washed away by the tides but documented in photographs and videos—the latter included in a room-size retrospective at the Victoria and Albert dedicated to his work—display the ceramicist’s spontaneous and experimental spirit. Though smaller in size, his ceramics are just as ambitious in their own way. A fan of Abstract Expressionist painting,

In Elias Hansen’s work, glass objects, including beakers, test tubes, and flasks—some found, others specially made, many brightly colored—are assembled with other secondhand items and light fixtures, often on wooden shelving, to suggest alchemical systems and processes of distillation. References to industrial-age apothecaries, the grit of basement meth labs, and Color Field formalism are often embedded in Hansen’s material compositions. In the work’s titles, jabs of morbid profundity are usually softened by a certain ordinariness, as with A handful of nothing, 2013: brown beer bottles