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Spring Gallery Guide

12 Galleries to Visit Now in Brooklyn and Queens

Those who think the gallery scene is all about Manhattan would do well to take the L train to spots like Williamsburg.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

These noteworthy gallery shows outside Manhattan are heavily tilted toward the L train axis that runs through Brooklyn and Queens, from Williamsburg to Ridgewood, and toward the young and artist-run spaces that are those boroughs’ specialties. (For two galleries on the southern edge of Williamsburg, Soloway and Black Ball Projects, take the J train.) Luhring Augustine is not on this list because its show “Sculpture,” running through May 5, was recently reviewed, but it is definitely worth a visit. Altogether, this guide will give you an extensive foundation from which to experience the city’s most dynamic art scene.

BLACK BALL PROJECTS through June 3; 374 Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, blackballprojects.com. The artist Anthony Graves, an American, and Carla Herrera-Prats, who is from Mexico, have been working together under the name Camel Collective since 2010. The centerpiece of their New York solo debut at this gallery is a magical mock-documentary video — starring Corey Tazmania and with lighting design by Tony Shayne — that uses the theater in general and lighting and makeup effects in particular to talk, with beguiling ambiguity, about artifice, reality and “invisible labor.”

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“Something Other Than What You Are” is an installation by Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats, who are known as the Camel Collective, at Black Ball Projects.Credit...Camel Collective

SOLOWAY through April 29; 348 South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, soloway.info. The latest entry in this South Williamsburg gallery’s always interesting lineup is “Several Years Have Passed,” which its curator, Jenny Nichols, named after a title card in Marcel Carné’s World War II-era film “Children of Paradise.” Its magnetic poles are two enormous unstretched paintings by Annette Wehrhahn, which combine cartoonish figurative outlines with storms of color to convey both grand ambition and intense ambivalence, and two coolly incisive videos by Abbey Williams. In “La Mulatta,” Ms. Williams layers an image of her own face, with slowly blinking eyes, over a photograph of a 19th-century terra-cotta bust of a bound slave.

TIGER STRIKES ASTEROID, MICROSCOPE AND TRANSMITTER all at 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick; tigerstrikesasteroid.com, microscopegallery.com, transmitter.nyc. These three artist-run spaces are entered through a loading dock. Transmitter is currently hosting “Living Still,” a thought-provoking group show of retrofuturist still lifes (through May 6), while Microscope will open an exhibition of Kevin Reuning’s etched-plexiglass deconstructions of computer-animated faces on Friday. (The show will close on June 3.) And for the last few weeks, the Maine-based painter Meghan Brady has been using the New York branch of the collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid as a studio, making thrilling, deceptively sophisticated wall-size acrylic collages for a show that opens on Friday and runs through May 6.

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“Remote Viewer,” 2017, an eerie installation by Tyler Coburn, is at Koenig & Clinton.Credit...Koenig & Clinton

KOENIG & CLINTON through June 2; 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick, koenigandclinton.com. This gallery, next door to the three just mentioned, offers Tyler Coburn’s “Remote Viewer,” which includes an extensive text piece and a digital animation of doodles taken from “Mental Radio,Upton Sinclair’s 1930 study of telepathy. But it didn’t really need more than the 12-foot-long tablet, produced in collaboration with the design firm Bureau V, that lies on the floor like an Arthur Clarke monolith that’s been reimagined in sinister Macintosh white. With burnished corners and a semi-gloss finish, it’s the perfect surface on which to project your fears and fantasies — even before you notice the corner, which is distorted into a ridge of horrifying ripples.

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Interstate Projects is showing “The Celibate Machine,” an exhibition by Cindy Ji Hye Kim. It includes, from left, “Parable of the Blind,” after Bruegel, and “As a Dog Returns to Its Vomit, a Man Repeats His Sins.”Credit...Interstate Projects, New York

INTERSTATE PROJECTS through May 6; 66 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick, interstateprojects.org. At this gallery, the only spot of color in Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s punchy mixed-media show “Celibate Machine” — aside from a glowing red “Exit” sign in the bunkerlike basement space — is a small pink silicone brick cast inside a can of Spam. Otherwise, everything, from a wall-size graphite reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Parable of the Blind,minus the people, to a short video loop of a kissing couple who have been rotoscoped into pulsing clouds, is in black and white. But by complicating an otherwise chilly investigation of cultural identity and depersonalized violence, that bit of pink makes all the difference.

SIGNAL through May 6; 260 Johnson Avenue, Bushwick, ssiiggnnaall.com. Performing together under the name FlucT, Sigrid Lauren and Monica Mirabile choreograph movements and expressions that reside in the intense, confusing and all-too-relevant space where sex and violence overlap. In the best of the mind-bending videos in this show — it plays on a screen mounted inside a doghouse — they also recite fragments of text that ricochet between existential inquiry and self-help-style command. (My favorite example was “Drop your shoulder and sacrifice your behavior out the mousehole!”) If you survive the passage through these disorienting amplifications of the American psyche, you’ll find in the gallery’s back room a serene concurrent show of extraordinary red ballpoint-pen drawings by Fin Simonetti. “Hearth (7),” in particular, which depicts a sheet of loose-leaf paper “watermarked” with a highly detailed cow, is a technical tour de force.

MOTEL through May 6; 1078 DeKalb Avenue, Bedford-Stuyvesant, bkmotel.org. This space is featuring Harry Gould Harvey IV’s intricate and peculiar driftwood dioramas — tramp art à la Brancusi. Using foraged clay, medium-density fiberboard and driftwood collected on the islands of Narragansett Bay, off Rhode Island, Mr. Harvey builds square towers, miniature biers and complicated arrangements of less identifiable shapes that are studded with thimble-size clay heads. One square tower, its base surrounded by red and green moss, is topped with a cross, a head and a tiny cloud of words, lettered in charcoal, about our present political confusion.

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“Turning Asphalt Into Brimstone,” by Harry Gould Harvey IV, in his show at Motel, which features pieces incorporating driftwood.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

MARVIN GARDENS through April 29; 1532 Decatur Street, Ridgewood, marvin-gardens.org. The Angeleno painter Sebastian Gladstone turned to stripped-down, nearly abstract landscapes after the presidential election, hoping to find safety, and even a kind of moral rejuvenation, in a stark simplification of terms. When you’re looking at two small yellow canvases, divided into quarters like window panes, you can almost believe it. But two irresistibly creepy close-up views of picket fences are proof that you can’t really escape your context: One set of wobbly stakes is battleship gray, the other streaky off-white, and each looks like an infinite row of demonic fingers.

MRS. through June 2; 60-40 56th Drive, Maspeth, mrsgallery.com. Less than two years old and tucked away in a residential corner of Maspeth, just over the Ridgewood line and nearly impossible to get to by subway, this storefront gallery is already mounting ambitious shows and getting major attention. The theme for its group exhibition “Dutch Masters” is delivered, appropriately enough, with an oversize histrionic wink: Caroline Wells Chandler’s “Green Goddess,” a four-foot-high, wall-mounted fake marijuana leaf. Made of green plastic foam, like a cheap Christmas wreath, and infested with cast-resin M&Ms, little mushrooms and happy-face buttons, this work is a sweetly self-conscious declaration that being silly and being serious are not necessarily opposed. Five colorful crocheted heads — think of a painting that’s also a potholder — by the same artist amplify this impression. Be sure to note Courtney Childress’s laid-back houseplant installation on your way in, and don’t miss Chris Martin’s van Gogh 2.0 charcoal drawing of a skeleton smoking a giant spliff before you leave.

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At Mrs., a gallery in Maspeth, Queens, Caroline Wells Chandler’s “Green Goddess” is a cheerily decorated representation of a marijuana leaf.Credit...Mrs. Gallery

KNOCKDOWN CENTER through June 17; 52-19 Flushing Avenue, Maspeth; knockdown.center. The truth is that it’s hard for any artist to compete with the 50,000-square-foot former door factory that is the Knockdown Center, a concert hall, event space, bar and gallery. But Macon Reed’s specially commissioned 52-foot-wide mural, “Who Is Watching You More Than You Are Watching You,” a fluorescent, cut-paper-like spin on Plato’s allegory of the cave, more than holds its own as you make your way to the elegant, unbalancing poetry of Chloë Bass’s eight-part “Book of Everyday Instruction.” It’s a series of conceptual projects designed to highlight the spaces between people, both literal and figurative.

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Macon Reed’s “Who Is Watching You More Than You Are Watching You” at Knockdown Center.Credit...Kalaija Mallery
A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Just Take the L Train. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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