Erik Parker, in his first New York show since 2005, turns to portraiture in his own exploration of the limits of recognition. Leaving aside the Rorschach-like symmetry of his earlier work, he has created large-scale portraits (most 2008-09) that are fragmented to smithereens. Our eye flickers over the jumble, sorting out the nose, locating the eyes, assembling the possible ears and tongues.

For his latest exploration of the landscape’s elasticity, painter Brendan Cass has landed upon a perfect psychic convergence of Jackson Pollock and PBS instructional painting guru Bob Ross. While the seven mostly large-scale canvases in the exhibition “New Nature” romanticize the environment with a slightly hippy-dippy naivete, they also make a rather sophisticated and compelling case for the redemptive power of contemporary painting. By approaching the landscape from an almost completely imaginary perspective, Cass is able to strike a fragile balance between the picturesque and the gestural.

Director John Waters’s ascent from notorious creator of Pink Flamingos (1972) to toast of Broadway is as instructive a lesson in the meshing of high and low American culture as is his film Pecker (1998), a cautionary fable—set in the art world—of redemption.

Long interested in both the subtext and paratext of, well, everything—from Road Runner cartoons to NASA images of outer space—Mungo Thomson has built a career on pulling back curtains to reveal the mechanics of production and reception. For “The Varieties of Experience,” the artist used predigital tools to expand on his tried-and-true themes and strategies.

Though it is wearying to track the dichotomies in the gleefully schizoid work of Aaron Curry, the artist presents them with undeniable panache. “The Colour Out of Space,” this young but established L.A. sculptor’s New York solo debut, opposes high and low, flat and spatial, abstract and figurative, rough and slick, esteem for the language of midcentury modernism and eagerness to send it up.