What does it mean for the life of an artwork when it can be experienced in dramatically different contexts, as a constellation rather than a point on a map? What happens when the legibility of a work is radically challenged by a shift in viewing conditions; do those terms become part of the work itself? Such are the questions posed by Jesse Stecklow’s exhibition “Staging Ground,” wherein autonomous works take on a double-life and exist independently as well as part of an encompassing installation.

The cultivated discomfort that this project incites stems from a socially-determined practice that challenges notions of singular authorship and the myth of the hermetic work of art; at the same time it retains some of these conventions, albeit entering them into a new visual syntax.

Upon entering the exhibition, which is dimly lit solely by fluctuating lighting elements interwoven throughout, one can feel their sensory organs becoming slowly recalibrated. The dark ambience and minimal visual stimuli heighten perception of the ticking and whirring sounds that punctuate the space.

Polished aluminum sheeting structures awash in and refracting alternating warm and cool lights dominate the exhibition and provide a sort of armature for more intimate spaces and encounters throughout. Outcroppings, perches, stages and maquettes set within this meandering structure house smaller works. Rounding the corner to the reverse side of the aluminum structure dividing the first room, one is met with a number of misplaced-looking parts and what pass as Minimalist and Dada-inspired assemblages. It takes a moment of orientation to notice the small framed inkjet print, Untitled (Parents’ Photo) (2015), lying flat on top of the shoulder-height modular ledge protruding from its aluminum armature. Moments such as this that demand that the viewer crane their neck and stoop low to get close to a work, or perambulate among components are frequent.

The composition of Untitled (Parents’ Photo) is made up of drawings of an ear set against circular marks and the image of wheat on a white background. These and other symbols recur throughout the show—ears, circles, ball bearings, aluminum, clocks, lights and found imagery relating to public transit are recapitulated into new forms. Moving in and out of sculptural, photographic, aural and ephemeral forms, it’s nearly impossible to tell where one work begins and another ends, which is very much the point. Kinetic potential, feedback loops, and the politics of public transportation are resounding themes.

The checklist accompanying the show mystifies but also offers clues. The medium information for Untitled (6:35, 18:35) (2014) lists “clock parts, packaging, carbograph 5 air samplers,” indicating that this sculpture is actively collecting airborne “data” from the exhibition space. The collection and mediation of data, processed both within and outside of art-specific contexts, is a driving property of Stecklow’s practice, and one that perpetually provides material for future transmogrifications. The authorial interplay between the artistic auteur and the network ensures that this work will never remain stuck within the confines of an established set of conventions, but also provides the maintenance of vital kernels of humanism along the way.

Allison Miller’s oeuvre is firmly and unequivocally rooted in the painting tradition, and yet is built upon a conviction, evident in her output over the past decade or so, to explore every inch of the possibilities, conditions and inherited clichés of painting. It operates more as a dynamic, undulating continuum than a machine on a trajectory. Equally adept at inventing strategies and systems as she is at destroying and subverting them, her work’s success largely depends on the interplay and balance of the two.

In Jaw (2016), for example, Miller plays on clichéd pictorial conventions as well as “doodling,” a form of “non art” art. A blue zigzag framing device resembling a caricature of an actual frame edges the painting, while symmetrical yet imperfect curlicues sit in the top corners, suggesting the rehashed tropes of pictorialism seen in children’s art. A horizon rests tacitly in the background as if to connote landscape. Bursting forth from these motifs comes an army of vertical stripes, which at times intermingle with the other elements but generally tear through the composition with a flattening effect. Miller often juxtaposes inherited tropes with unexpected elements that disrupt our conditioned visual modes.

The title of her current exhibition, “Screen Jaw Door Arch Prism Corner Bed,” is a combination of the titles from all seven works in the show. Bed (2016), a diptych and her largest work to date, occupies the entirety of “The Pit II,” the smaller room adjoined to the main gallery. Like many of Miller’s works, its syntax consists of both purposeful structural marks and those that appear more haptic and improvised. Here, more than with the other works, is a clearer delineation of the succession of the acts that contributed to the creation of the work, and more negative space left around the marks. Perhaps the traces of how the artist created this work in time contributes to its relative lack of strength in comparison to the others.

Miller’s works seem to operate most successfully when the surfaces convey a certain visual democracy, achieved at least in part by the obscuring of chronology—something she does exceptionally well in Corner (2016). It’s quite difficult to say whether she began with the foreground or background of Corner, all parts feel simultaneous. Yet ironically, this simultaneity encourages a more extended temporal experience of the work. Flat areas of disharmonious colors butt up against scatterings of more tightly-controlled line motifs. The work is simple in its basic visual vocabulary and composition but seduces the viewer with its deliciously unconventional use of color. Another highlight of the show is Door (2015), a composition split crassly into thirds. Here, gorgeously rich blacks meet fractured lines—the color palette of the Fauvists—and soft, bloated shapes reminiscent of the work of Philip Guston. These works are underpinned by their ability to let viewers vicariously live in the simultaneous pleasure and provisional quality of their creation. One gets the sense that they are, in the end, as a much of a surprise to Miller as to the viewer.