In Todd Hido’s exhibition of 17 recent large and medium-size C-prints, titled “A Road Divided,” unpopulated, fog-shrouded landscapes are the recurring subject. Playing off the artist’s well-known nocturnal photographs of isolated suburban houses bathed in colorful and ominous light, these new, portentous pictures focus on a very different kind of illumination, but one that also reveals lonely and impersonal worlds. Recalling the moody pictorialism of Stieglitz’s early images, these impressionistic works depict country roads and snow-covered vacant lots, forlorn places that convey an unsettling sense of emptiness.

Continuing a photographic tradition of capturing the denizens of the back roads of the Pacific Northwest, Mark Barnes’s recent exhibition at Blue Sky included 43 black-and-white photos from 1992 to the present that document life along the lower Columbia River basin. That tradition dates back as far as Edward S. Curtis (who dressed up Native Americans in traditional garb at the turn of the 20th century) and stretches forward to Larry Fink (who caught loggers on the Olympic Peninsula in unguarded moments in the late 1970s). “Down River” was the fifth solo show since 1976 for a photographer who has also exhibited in New York, Rhode Island, Uzbekistan and Russia.

In a recent interview, New Museum curator Laura Hoptman suggested that Alexandra Bircken’s delicate assemblages of wool, twigs and found objects demonstrated an enthusiasm for the handmade reminiscent of the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and ’70s. And indeed, like the American exodus that drew hundreds of city dwellers to the countryside in quest of a better life, Bircken’s signature knitted sculptures seem infused with nostalgia for a time when what mattered was making things, not buying them.

The 35-year-old Italian sculptor Giuseppe Gabellone consistently confounds expectations. He often fashions pieces in surprising ways, for example press-molding a series of ukiyo-e-inspired reliefs in a silvery substance that turns out to be a mixture of tobacco, aluminum powder and glue.

Over the last 50 years, Jonas Mekas has been without doubt one of the most important figures in experimental film. Along with his own filmmaking, he started the magazine Film Culture in 1955, organized the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (1962) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque (1964), and, finally, founded Anthology Film Archives in 1970, where he later became (and remains) director. (All are, or were, in New York.) By gathering these different roles—director, critic and curator—in one person, he not only actively combined the fields of theory and practice, but over a long period significantly shaped our perception of experimental film, and expanded what independent cinema could be.