Carrie Moyer re-creates, or more exactly reimagines, a particular style: a Gallic Anglo-American mid-20th-century modern (as distinct from modernism), a style sometimes called “moderne,” a look that signifies better living through biomorphic grace.

A quick scan of the already considerable literature on Tris Vonna-Michell shows that he was born in 1982 in Southend-on-Sea, UK—or in Rochford, or Leigh-on-Sea—and that he lives in Stockholm and London, or in Southend. There is agreement, though, on a seminal project: it involved renting a room in Berlin and shredding childhood snapshots.

The 18 loosely grouped paintings (all 2009) that Ross Chisholm presented in his first New York solo show brought to mind nothing so much as a postmodern version of a BBC miniseries set in an earlier age. Plumbing the last 300 years of English life using today’s painterly rhetoric, this Briton revels in the way the two moments—then and now—never quite mesh.

The first North American survey of Dutch video installation artist Aernout Mik (b. 1962), organized by MoMA film curator Laurence Kardish, placed eight works (1996-2009) in gallery and non-gallery settings (hallways, lobby, etc.) throughout the museum. The unusual locations furthered the sense of disorientation Mik cultivates in his works.

Shinique Smith, a young artist with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, burst onto the New York scene in the early 2000s with an unusual sculptural medium—secondhand clothes. The garments were tied together into cubes, called “Bale Variants,” which constitute three-dimensional versions of Smith’s early fabric collages.