A girl clad in a wide-collared smock, knee-high socks, and black buckled shoes stands before a leafy green-and-black pattern, worked over in a thick impasto. Her dark skin and composed expression, by contrast, appear smooth, having been rendered in the artist’s characteristically dry paint application, which lends these figures their softness. Perhaps she’s posing on the first day of school. Just as the figure’s glinting gaze anchors the composition of this large-format work in oil and acrylic, the painting, titled Mary Jane, 2008, itself grounded the first London exhibition devoted to Noah

Like so many beguiling things, the works in Jennifer Bornstein’s recent exhibition “Ghosts” looked simpler than they were. Eight unique gelatin silver prints, large in scale (roughly five and a half by three and a half feet), they bore unembellished titles, among them Teacup, 2019; Two Houses on Fire, 2020; and Big Heads, 2021. But these are not what the photographs are of, not really—to the extent that a photograph is ever of anything at all.

Teacup contains two images (though I began to think of them as dreams or hallucinations), one above the other: In stark profile, a cartoonish figure with

In 2012, Theresa May, then British home secretary, introduced the hostile environment policy, restricting undocumented migrants’ access to housing, employment, and health care. By 2019, a special rapporteur to the United Nations had detailed how under May’s successor Amber Rudd, “the rotten core” of the legislation remained, “destroying the lives and livelihoods of racial and ethnic minority communities more broadly.” Immigrant women, even those with paperwork in order, had become reluctant to give birth in hospitals after staffers were effectively deputized as immigration law enforcement. More