Hao Ni. Cig Tower, 2015; ash, ashtray, cigarettes, acrylic paint, wood; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Both across and within Ni’s works, past and present, finitude and immortality collide and collude; material accretions invoke layers of time, and perceptions of physical wholeness and visual cohesion shift and splinter. In the work Cig Tower (2015), one encounters a single, sculpted form that quickly dissolves into constituent parts: cigarettes, ashtrays, acrylic paint, wood. As the viewer visually deconstructs the piece, the original function of any given element—its once-defining feature, its essential raison d’être—is displaced by connotations and associations, and material meaning yields to an ambiguous being-ness.

The title Ghost Hit Wall is derived from a Mandarin Chinese expression for getting lost, and to walk among the works on view is to feel increasingly adrift within the confines of a fragmented, digressive story. One is in the midst of—what? A scene, a site, perhaps, of some happening whose precise nature is unknowable yet vaguely otherworldly and decidedly dark. Thus, in a corner of the first room, we encounter the work Njoy the Patron Saint of E Cigarettes (2015). Faceless, shapeless, and seated on a wooden chair, this foreboding figure is essentially a cascade of black fabric, its “head” wearing a crown of faux electronic cigarettes. To its left are installed two BMW E90 headlights, whose beams illuminate wafting clouds of smoke.

Hao Ni. Window IV, 2015 (detail); windows, stickers, tape, paper, spray paint on glass, acrylic paint on plastic; 48 x 60 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Indeed, as one wanders from room to room amid the recorded notes of a xylophone, one registers a quiet sense of aftermath: A broken window stands upright on the floor, surrounded by shards of glass; a wall bears pages of a musical score, the individual sheets charred and burned. The former, part of Window IV (2015), also incorporates random stickers, paint, an “Open” sign, and tape. Interestingly, the quotidian nature of the artist’s chosen materials—window frames, stickers, cigarettes—heightens a feeling of disorientation. Decontextualized and appropriated as raw material, everyday detritus both recalls the supposedly known and confronts us with the unknown; it attunes us to the fluidity of meaning and the mystery that resides in even the humblest of materials.

Hao Ni. Structure Study III, 2014 (still); video; 10:23. Courtesy of the Artist.

Elsewhere, the interplay of human senses—of seeing and hearing—informs and parallels that of tangible and intangible elements. In the gallery’s second room, one comes upon Structure Study III (2014), a video documenting a performance by the artist in Taiwan. Here, the score of the aforementioned xylophone music faces a screen on the opposite wall. The screen shows a video of the score being performed on presumably the same instrument heard throughout the gallery. Within the work, process and performance are simultaneous yet distinct, while time and space both expand and contract. The material presence of the score incarnates the ambient tones of the xylophone, the video brings the past into the present, and the music, heard even when the video is not seen, claims a disembodied freedom.

Collectively, the works in Ghost Hit Wall conjure a suggestive yet indeterminate space, one in which the raw, charged stuff of our accelerated age is seized upon and arrested in its expected course toward oblivion. In effect, Ni challenges us to a deeper engagement with what we see, feel, and hear, encouraging us to pull aside the curtain of assumptions that casts so much of life into darkness.

Hao Ni: Ghost Hit Wall is on view at Yellow Peril Gallery through July 19, 2015.

Andy Warhol. Pia Zadora, 1983; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

A 2008 gift from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the exhibition’s 105 color and 52 black-and-white photographs hint at what the curators describe as Warhol’s “compulsive use of the medium,” both as prefatory sketch and documentary vehicle. Warhol embraced photography as early as the 1950s, when appropriated photos often served as the basis for his advertising and portrait work. The show’s images, however, date from 1970 onward, when Warhol discovered and became enamored of Polaroid’s SX-70 Big Shot camera. The resulting flood of color snapshots, a mere sampling of which are on view here, were integral to Warhol’s larger creative process. Yet seen today, and installed as they are at RISD in thought-provoking clusters, they acquire a fascination all their own as surreptitious character studies—absorbing, elusive, yet resolutely open-ended.

Wearing the guise of offhand snapshots, Warhol’s color images enact a cat-and-mouse game of obfuscation and revelation. Particularly telling is the obvious use of heavy makeup, whose implications of performance, masking, and premeditation challenge the snapshot’s connotations of candor. Thus in Maria Shriver (1978), Dorothy Blau (1982), and Pia Zadora (1983), chalky faces and red lips defy the viewer’s searching gaze. In fact the direct, unblinking stare of Warhol’s subjects, who are framed head-on in direct confrontation with the camera, is initially more withholding than revealing. “Make no mistake,” these portraits seem to say, “this is a controlled, stage-managed encounter.”

Indeed, but who is the stage manager? To a significant extent, each sitter’s presence becomes less an assertion of individual identity than an inscrutable amalgam of performance and manipulation—by the photographer as well as by the subject. The images conflate illusion and authenticity, self-possession and exploitation; wearing the depersonalizing mask of artifice, they enlist the simplest and most informal of photographic mechanisms—the instant camera—to surprisingly complex and provocative effect.

Andy Warhol. Maria Shriver, 1978; Polaroid photograph. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Commenting on his subjects’ feelings about the Polaroid film shoots—and they were, in fact, formal shoots—Warhol remarked, “They like it, even though it’s painful—bright lights, the flashcubes. I try to make everybody look great.” This quote, featured prominently alongside the show’s images, acquires a pointed if ambiguous significance. In one respect, Warhol’s statement underlines the staged nature of the images; in another, it proclaims the artist’s supposedly straightforward intention in creating them. Yet, like so much else in Warhol’s life and work, the apparent invariably gives way to something deeper and darker—a sense of meaning and intent that is disconcertingly opaque.

Here, that “something” seems bound to the underlying nature of the imaged identity and, more specifically, to a sense—subtly yet cogently expressed in these portraits—that this identity is inherently fragile, premised on a needy vulnerability. In submitting to the “painful” demands of the photo shoot, Warhol’s subjects trust that the artist will “make them look great”; the artist essentially becomes the “maker” of his subjects’ visual selves, which are conjured and validated through the artist’s camera. Given this context, the portrait series Mrs. Carlo Bilotti and Daughter (1980) becomes especially interesting. Mrs. Bilotti and her adolescent daughter are framed side by side, the former wearing the ever-present heavy makeup. While the mother stares directly into the camera, the daughter, in each of the four shots, directs her gaze to some point outside the frame. Despite—or perhaps because of—her  youth, the daughter maintains a powerful integrity of self. By refusing to acknowledge the camera, the girl declares, however unconsciously, an essential personal autonomy; her presence conveys an innocent inscrutability that deflects any attempt to read her internal life.

Warhol’s Polaroid snapshots reveal a formality and degree of deliberation that are, considering the medium, subversive—the tossed-off snapshot becomes the ambiguously layered portrait; the instantaneous Polaroid records the strategically prepared sitting. Meanwhile, black-and-white images such as People on the Street (ca. 1980), captured using a 35mm camera and printed using the traditional gelatin silver process, convey both an of-the-moment immediacy and a subtle aesthetic awareness.

Andy Warhol. People on the Street, ca. 1980; gelatin silver print. © Andy Warhol. Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.

Significantly, the exhibition notes that “while the Polaroids tended to turn everyone into a glamorous Warhol icon, the black-and-white images…tended to make everyone ordinary.” It is this very ordinariness that yields a striking poignancy, and the apparent absence of the artist’s hand foregrounds the sheer dynamism of his subjects. Thus in Keith Haring, Juan Dubose, and Joe Deitrich (ca. 1980), a series of three shots, the camera becomes an unobtrusive observer of life being lived, and the photograph becomes a testament to the careless youth and fleeting beauty of its subjects.

Gazing at this image, the viewer registers a sense of time collapsing, as the young men’s offhand vitality coincides with the viewer’s retrospective awareness of imminent tragedy—AIDS would claim first Dubose, then Haring, by decade’s end. This casual image thus becomes a kind of paradoxical memento mori—it recalls an irretrievable past yet exists in a pure present, one that defies both past and future. Such ambiguity is the unassuming, utterly compelling through-line of Warhol’s photographs. It is also, perhaps, the most compelling proof of the artist behind the myth.

Andy Warhol’s Photographs is on view at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence through June 29.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Vestige, 2010, from the series Pre-Existing Condition; archival pigment print; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI

Entering the first of Yellow Peril’s two rooms, the viewer encounters Bloatation (2009), one of several evocatively titled photographs displayed around the room. Though impossible to identify, the swollen, globular form—framed, still-life fashion, against a richly hued backdrop—immediately suggests some kind of gaseous, grossly distended organ. On an adjacent wall, Vestige (2010) and Sever (2009) exude an immediate, paradoxical charge. Like the other photographs on view, they register as exquisitely rendered visions of the indecipherably grotesque—repellent yet entrancing, gory yet beautiful. Vestige is redolent of carnage and bodily remains: a white, gruesomely stained drape foregrounds a motley assemblage of shredded, torn detritus. Fur? Fabric? This image, apparently so explicit, is suddenly ambiguous; its disconcerting contents seem to refract some inner morass of subliminal association and shape-shifting horror.

Almanas’s work seems to arise from and delineate the deepest, most elemental dimensions of being—silent, invisible dimensions that, here, scream forth in all their emotional, corporeal force. Significantly, Almanas refers to her photographs as “visceral tableaux,” and she entwines the conceptual and the formal, the classical and the contemporary, the intellectual and the emotional to provocative, revelatory effect. In her photographic compositions, material is not merely a means but an incarnation and formal technique is a language through which intentions and ideas come vividly to life. Similarly, the primal urgency that courses so powerfully throughout Almanas’s images is inextricable from a sly, free-spirited playfulness.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Bloatation, 2009, from the series Pre-Existing Condition; archival pigment print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI.

Given the carnal aura of the artist’s imagery, the viewer may be taken aback to learn that Almanas composes her photographs from benign, even homey, materials: jellies, fruit juices, pastry dough. As she writes in her accompanying artist’s statement: “I play with how we recognize ourselves in textures and materials…. Sweet objects, that could potentially be consumed, act as surrogate body parts. The fleshy forms lie, hang, and nestle within these explicit scenes, both seducing and disgusting the viewer.” To contemplate Almanas’s work is thus to yield to a fascinating state of persistent, provocative uncertainty, wherein visceral reaction collides and interacts with conscious reflection. The viewer is fundamentally destabilized and utterly disoriented, and the very act of looking morphs into a charged and ambiguous exchange.

Kathryn Parker Almanas. Three Systems of a Woman: Digestive, Reproductive, Nervous, 2010; sections of anatomy book pages, sections of photographs by artist, medical bandaging and materials, suturing thread; triptych, each collage 13 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI

The show, curated by Robert P. Stack, also includes several of the artist’s finely wrought collages, displayed here in a room of their own. These small-scale works, composed of delicately sutured layers of appropriated medical illustrations, magazine pastry images, and the artist’s own photographs, are quiet revelations of material beauty and penetrating subtlety. Mesmerizing unto themselves and fascinating in their relationship to the artist’s photographs, the collages refine and intensify the artist’s inquiry into body, psyche, and the experiential implications of both. They underscore the vital integration of material and meaning, concept and form, that suffuses Almanas’s larger body of work—work that is, finally, a hypnotic concatenation of all that makes human experience so riveting, so confounding, so messily resplendent.

Kathryn Parker Almanas’s Pre-Existing Condition is on view at Yellow Peril Gallery through August 11, 2013.