Maayan Strauss, an artist and architect, is no stranger to the creative studio. After studying architecture at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and in the middle of earning an MFA in photography at Yale, the polymath sought out an altogether different kind of studio space: a freight cargo ship that typically carries commercial goods, not people. Her own transatlantic trip was the impetus for Container Artist Residency, a program that seeks to transform freighters into temporary artists studios.

When the Storefront for Art & Architecture announced a competition for the Worldwide Storefront, requesting proposals for alternative creative production platforms around the globe, Strauss saw a natural fit for her conviction that a space need not be a place. So did jury members Joseph Grima and Beatrice Galilee, who selected Container Artist Residency as one of 10 projects to receive seed funding through Worldwide Storefront. Documentation from Strauss’s initial transatlantic trip is on view at Storefront’s Kenmare Street space through November 21, and materials from artist Carlos Vela Prado’s upcoming pilot residency will be added next month.

“Artist residencies are typically tied to a geographical place, while this project is anchored in a context and not in one physical location,” said Strauss. “Global commerce then becomes the immediate work environment, rather than the fuel for the creative economy in which artists make and sell their work,” she added. ARTINFO lured Strauss out of her own New York studio space to learn more about her unorthodox approach to transience and art-making.

How did you conceive the Container Artist Residency?

Between my first and second year at the Yale photography MFA in summer 2011, I went to Israel for the summer and I didn’t have a flight back to the States. A friend asked when I was coming back to New Haven, and I sort of joked, “I’m really broke so I don’t know if I’ll be able to.” He responded that I should just go on a freight ship. And I laughed and thought it was brilliant. I spent part of the summer between my first and second year, almost a month, trying to get a freightliner to agree to take me on board and to let me take photos. They almost never let people who don’t work on the ship travel on board, and usually, that has to be planned months in advance.

But your first education is in architecture. How did that impact your thinking about the initial trip?

Firstly, I was frustrated with the idea that it’s so expensive for me to travel while everything around me — like basic commercial goods — travels all the time. It was a response to a really basic frustration when you don’t have the funds to travel, and you’re thinking about objects moving around in a very material and spatial way. But as regards the experience, it’s really interesting because in terms of city planning and the structure of our contemporary cities, you have the façade, the city center that are the image of this economy where you shop. But the ports are on the outskirts of every city, but typically very hidden — behind a fence, in an area that is on the way from A to B but not itself a destination. I wanted to penetrate that — they’re very restricted environments — and eventually, entering the port in Haifa where I boarded was an amazing experience. Quite surreal: heavy machinery, bells ringing, workers moving around, utter commotion that feels archaic. It was like going the behind-the-scenes of the global commodities economy.

Boarding the ship was also an interesting spatial experience. Once you’re out on the sea, there’s a really strong contrast between the vastness of the sea and the containment of the interiors that you’re in. And being on the ship as a passenger and an artist is interesting, because everyone else on the ship is working. You’re the only person there who isn’t assigned some specific task necessary for the completion of the trip and the management of the ship. It makes you realize that you’re almost never in spaces that you aren’t assigned to be in. The whole project is basically architecture — it’s not about building anything, it’s about appropriating and reactivating a space that is often overlooked.

What kind of work did you produce during your trip on the ship?

I was on the liner for almost three weeks, first stopping around Mediterranean ports and then making the transatlantic trip. I mainly took photographs and videos during that time, and after getting back I was trying to sort out all the materials I had produced. I’m not just a photographer, but also an architect, and I felt like there was something more to be done with these materials and with the experience, a bigger conclusion to be drawn about creative spaces. I had the idea to develop a residency out of that trip before I even graduated from Yale in 2012. I got in touch with Maersk, the biggest freighter company in the world, and started developing a proposal for commercial shipping lines to facilitate the project.

It’s interesting — most museum money today comes from private donors who have their own commercial interests. I think it would be interesting to see artists behave in an equally commercial manner, and engage openly with business entities like liner companies to facilitate the realization of their own ideas.

What is the state of the container residency project now? How did you become involved with the Storefront for Art and Architecture?

I was trying to pitch the idea to a couple of big shipping lines, and realized in the process that it’s close to impossible to form a collaboration as an independent artist with one of those shipping lines. But in the process of collecting and developing more materials, I became more certain of the conceptual value of the project. So when I heard about Storefront’s open call in January of this year for projects about multi-locus unorthodox spaces, I already had a proposal for it. I found out in mid-March that I won.

And what does your participation in Worldwide Storefront entail?

Well, I’m part of the current exhibition in the Kenmare Street gallery space, which contains documentation from my original trip. As part of the show, I’m also sending a pilot artist, sculptor Carlos Vela Prado, to do a two-week trip from New York to the Panama Canal by freighter. He’s going to be living on board in the same kind of cabin that the crew lives in, which is pretty much a small hotel room that will double as his studio. It’s pretty open in terms of the work he’s going to do. An important part of the experience is that there’s no Internet on board the ship, which is actually quite exotic in that we’ve become so unaccustomed to not having ongoing communication. Because of that, your sense of place is determined not by a GPS app, but by immediate surroundings: climate, light, and the landscape, or in this case, the seascape.

So not only is a ship interesting on a basic architectural level — structurally and as shelter — but the materials that the artist works with on the ship are also the architect’s basic materials, in a sense. And being largely isolated from land and from technology, the artist can reexamine their own daily life and the role of technology in their practice. I don’t necessarily imagine the artist will make work only on board. I imagine them having this trip as a kind of educational experience, and then making the work afterwards.

— Wendy Vogel talked to US Venice Biennale Rep Joan Jonas about her current HangarBicocca retrospective.

— Martin Gayford reviewed “Late Turner” at the Tate.

— Ashton Cooper interviewed Mickalene Thomas on her foray into bronze sculptures, now on view at Kavi Gupta in Chicago.

— Anneliese Cooper spoke with Kevin Moore, the artistic director of Cincinnati’s FotoFocus Biennial, which opened Friday.

— The University of Texas, Dallas and the Dallas Museum of Art premiered their brand new art history institute.

— In the Air dreamed up five films that Marina Abramovic and Lars Von Trier should make together.

 — The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts announced that it would devote an exhibition to the legacy of the Riot Grrrl punk feminist movement.

— The Met opened its ambitious show of Pieter Coecke Van Aelst’s Renaissance tapestries.

— eBay launched a live auction hub with Sotheby’s just in time for the November auctions.

— Craig Hubert reviewed Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" at the New York Film Festival.

— Patrick Pacheco wrote a tribute for two-time Tony Award winner Geoffrey Holder.

— Reporting from the New York Film Festival, Craig Hubert reviewed Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” starring Juliette Binoche.

“Boredom is really important to me,” said Michelle Grabner, standing among the pattern-based paintings in her debut solo exhibition with James Cohan Gallery in New York. “Situational boredom,” she clarified. Meaning a certain mindset that can be achieved, in the studio, through concerted effort, labor, and mark-making. (In discussing all of this with her, I actually do a good job of avoiding uttering the words obsessive or meditative.) Grabner certainly doesn’t seem bored, and this past year shouldn’t have left her with all that much time to sink into lethargic contemplation. She’s many things in addition to simply being an artist. She’s a Midwesterner — oscillating between Chicago and Milwaukee — a regional identity that’s important to her career. She’s an occasional curator, most recently part of the trio charged with organizing the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She’s a wife and a mother of three, as evidenced by a large-scale photograph, taken in the garden outside of her Milwaukee studio, which captures the whole clan; that photo is framed and suspended as one element in a hanging sculpture at James Cohan, the tenth in a series of “oysters” that Grabner has constructed. (The oyster is large, it looms, it’s composed of a sort of enormous-contact-lens-shape of bashed garbage can lids to which she’s affixed a silverpoint tondo painting, the aforementioned family portrait, and a cast-concrete sculpture of a chair her daughter once used, among other things.) She’s also a teacher — a visiting professor at Bard earlier this year, now returned to the Art Institute of Chicago — and most likely a very good one, based on the eloquent-but-no-bullshit way she discusses her own work. She’s fond of the adjective vernacular, in a positive sense. A painting of a “granny quilt” with an X pattern in its weave reminds her of a riff on a “domesticated” version of Christopher Wool or Wade Guyton.   

What’s with the blankets, the gingham, the textiles, you ask? They’re not special blankets, Grabner clarified. Post-grad school, when she was a young mother, she made a lot of paintings that focused on pattern, but in a specific, and very personal, sense. “I was really drawn to patterns in my domestic middle-class lifestyle: The blankets that the kids were swaddled in,” she said. More recently, she “wanted to revisit that same kind of domestic patterning, but without the nostalgia.” Remove the biographical connection and it’s more about process — Grabner stretches the actual fabrics across the canvas, using them as a type of stencil, spray-painting atop the textile and then fleshing out the image with glossy, hardware-store-bought enamel paints that she said people often mistake for the texture of ceramics. As such, she explained, they occupy that weird space between the abstract and the figurative: Pattern-based, but also clearly depicting a real thing that exists in the world. 

At James Cohan, the front-room installation visible from the street includes a low-lying stage strewn with woven-paper works paired with highly detailed close-up photographs of layered gingham fabric. Grabner has been weaving paper for a while — it’s “math and counting,” she said, and ties back to the philosophies of Frederich Fröbel, the progenitor of kindergarten. When one of her sons was a grade-schooler, Grabner recalled, he came home from school with a basic woven-paper assignment. She made a representational painting of the abstract craftwork; later, she started making actual weavings. An array of them are also laid out beneath the aforementioned “oyster,” their colors reflected in the metal of its garbage-can shell.

Not included in the exhibition, but tucked in a back room during my visit, are two familiar examples of Grabner’s practice, both tondo-shaped paintings. One is a huge, circular canvas with a hypnotic, eye-wiggling spiral pattern — an Archimedes spiral, she clarified, composed of hundreds of tiny, silvery dots. (Grabner dabs a small brush with pigment, then dot, dot, dots, each sphere gradually diminishing until the brush is reloaded, a structured-chance-based process that has much in common with Polly Apfelbaum’s recent marker-on-textile works.) Leaning against the viewing room wall there’s also a pair of small silverpoint tondos, for which Grabner loads a soft, 18-gauge silver wire into a stylus and marks with the metal as if it were a pencil. These pieces change over time, she said, darkening as they oxidize — more quickly in polluted cities. (She also does these works in goldpoint, but “it’s the least interesting — because it’s inert. It stays gold.”)

And so Grabner makes work, informed by boredom, that isn’t boring in the least, and labors over repetitive patterns and motifs that somehow don’t read as laborious or repetitive. “The danger of the work is decorating,” she said. “Overdesigning, particularly in install, could be devastating.” Yet despite the reliance on patterns — jovial, domestic, familiar, homebody — the end result is anything but rigid. Grabner takes the ordered grid and disturbs it — like a de-woven piece of burlap, the subject of another small series featured in this exhibition — smartly teasing apart the threads of convention. 

“Listen Up Philip” is a movie about men who despise women. Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry, and starring Jason Schwartzman as the antagonizing title character, the film, which screened this week at the New York Film Festival, has more, of course, that it wants to communicate — how those same women refuse to let those men ruin their lives; the sway of cultural influence and affectation — and, to be clear right at the beginning, the film certainly doesn’t endorse the behavior of its main characters. There is no path to discovery, of pulling away at a mask. They are horrible people from the first frame until the last, drowning so deep in their own narcissism that there’s no hope of coming up for air.

Philip is almost too much to handle. The narration that slips in and out of the film (voiced by Eric Bogosian) is both overbearing and funny, first because it seems so self-serious and opposed to what is happening on screen, and secondly because you can image Philip, a novelist, sulking around the streets of New York with a narrator present in his head, justifying and explaining his every decision. He’s the kind of writer who’s more consumed with the idea of being a writer than, it seems, the act of writing itself.

Although that last part is not entirely clear, maybe intentionally. While we never read any of Philip’s words, we understand from most people around him that he is a good writer. His novels are as successful as novels can be, despite his widespread arrogance. This is not the story of a failed writer with an inflated ego, but one who is respected, which complicates the portrait. We can’t really feel sorry for him. His attitude is not based on failure, but success. He’s not a sore loser but a sore winner. His scorched-earth policy toward everything around him, including his photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elizabeth Moss), is based on the image he has in his head of what he’s supposed to be like. Like a good novel, a novelist excels in conflict, not stasis.

Unfortunately, Philip is encouraged in his behavior by his new friend, the famous author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce). The most obvious Philip Roth influence in the film, Zimmerman, aside from sharing a name with one of Roth’s most famous characters, bears a striking resemblance to the real author’s public image — grey hair, sweaters, and a penchant for crankiness and mistreatment of women. Ike takes Philip in as his mentor, in turn drawing him into his exiled and depressing world. During an extended stay at Ike’s home outside the city, Philip encounters his daughter, Melanie (Krysten Ritter), who becomes as much of an imagined foil for the narrative Philip has constructed around himself as she remains for her father, who conflates her existence with the failed marriage to her mother, which he crushed under the weight of his own ego and selfishness.

There’s also a third female character that enters the film towards the end, Yvette, a French professor at the college Philip miserably begins teaching at. At first she hates him, jealous at how easy he got the position and how much she had to work for it, but soon implausibly falls for him. But the film is not concerned with how they fell in love but how Philip inevitably pushes her away.

“Listen Up Philip” would have been an unbearable film if not for Ross’s penchant for letting the narrative slip away from the main character. The most notable example of this is the attention paid on Ashley, who is shown fully going through the motions of her separation from Philip. As much as she annoyed him, he got under her skin, and her transformation from allowing Philip to walk all over her to fully blocking him from her life is displayed with painful attention to detail, and offers a rare instance of hope in the film.

Unfortunately, it’s one of the few, if not only moment of its kind in the film. There is no such transformation in the cards for Philip. The most tragic thing about his character, and the film itself, is how early you realize this is somebody who is fully invested in the person he’s created, and will never change. He will continue to squeeze himself into others’ lives and walk away with a trail of flames behind him. If “Listen Up Philip” is a condemnation of men like the title character, it also doesn’t blame the women who get wrapped up with them. Misery loves company, but company doesn’t need to stick around.  

Let’s be clear: “Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior” isn’t just a show about drugged-out art, but there are plenty of references to magic mushrooms, as well as a furry pink carpet covering much of the floor (well, the parts of the floor not taken up by one of Jim Lambie’s overpowering striped-rainbow installations). For chrissakes there’s a huge painting of raccoons wielding paintbrushes, courtesy of Peter Saul, so clearly we’re in slightly inebriated territory. The exhibition — curated by Phong Bui and Rail Curatorial Projects, and hosted in Red Bull Studios New York’s massive, bi-level space through December 14 — is a wild and colorful journey into another dimension. And like any such trip, there’s bound to be occasional slippages into the dark side (a motorized sculpture by Jon Kessler, which features an amputated, plug-pierced ear emitting bubbles, does that job nicely).

“Spaced Out” includes a lot of painting, much of it exuberant, abstract, and highly patterned: Keltie Ferris, Tamara Gonzales, James Siena, and Chris Martin (who concurrently has a very glittery show over at Anton Kern Gallery). The sculptural inclusions in the show tend toward the very modest (a tiny cricket cage carved from human bone by Charles LeDray; one of Robert Gober’s phallic-beeswax candles) to the monumental (a goofy, metallic bust by Ugo Rondinone, which lords over the main gallery space with a shit-eating grin on its vacant face). Brooklyn artist Fred Tomaselli—  who is readily associated with an interest in mind-expansion, and who has occasionally used drugs as a medium — has an amazing older piece in the basement level. “Geology Lesson,” 1986, is a desk whose top is covered with dozens of tiny, upward-facing speakers, each filled with a few pinches of cat litter; tap a button and the speakers come to life, emitting a growing tone whose vibrations cause the litter to shiver and bounce. The sculpture is a marvel of lo-fi special effect.

Will Ryman — an artist whose paintbrush-mazes and nail-birds have never particularly thrilled me — also has a stunner in this exhibition: “Infinity,” 2014, a cheeky-and-creepy homage to Yayoi Kusama’s light-filled rooms, except this one’s walls, ceiling, and floor are covered with child-sized sneakers. It’s an immersive little den within the hyper-real immersive environment that Bui and his Brooklyn Rail cohorts have transformed the entire space into: A celebration of the proudly nonsensical, drug-addled or otherwise. 

LONDON — Christie’s kicked off events for Frieze Week with what it said was London’s most valuable auction ever of a private post-war and contemporary art collection.

Sales came to £46.9 million, or $75.3 million, as 43 works were offered from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria. The event featured works by German masters such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, and Martin Kippenberger, as well as international artists such as Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, and Louise Bourgeois.

The top lot was a Richter 1970 four-panel picture of the sky, “Wolken (Fenster)” or “Clouds (Window).” The large work, a detailed piece of photorealism of the evening sky, made £6.2 million with premium, a price between its hammer-price estimates of £5 million and £7 million.

Another Richter, an abstract titled “Netz,” failed to sell in the public sale against an upper estimate put at £10 million, and was sold afterwards for £5.5 million, Christie’s said.

“Indian With Eagle,” a 1975 portrait by Polke, more than doubled its £2 million top estimate to sell for £5.1 million.

The auction had been estimated to make as much as £56.8 million.

Karlheinz Essl, the founder of Austrian hardware store chain BauMax Holding AG, built up the collection over 50 years.

“Although it is not easy for us to part from these works, I am delighted that Christie’s has found buyers who will enjoy them as much as my wife Agnes and I did,” Karlheinz Essl said in a statement. “We are equally delighted that through the proceeds of this sale, the long-term future of the Essl Museum is now secured.” The gallery, in Klosterneuburg, Vienna, has more than 7,000 artworks.

“In a month of retrospectives of Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke in London, it was great to see outstanding prices achieved for Polke and Baselitz, which confirmed the growing market confidence in German post-war art,” said Francis Outred, chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s.

The week also includes Frieze Art Fair and other sales by Christies, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonhams.

The Blouin Creative Leadership Summit 2014 kicked off its ninth year with a speech by Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art. Organized in strategic partnership with the United Nations Office of Partnerships and aligned with the aims of the Millennium Development Goals, the Summit addressed challenges facing the developing world and brought together private and public stakeholders from these nations and more developed ones to share best practices and knowledge, and to forge new opportunities on a global scale. Lowry shared his views on the importance of artistic expression. 

It’s not surprising that FotoFocus founder Thomas Schiff specializes in panoramas. Though an insurance salesman by trade, Schiff’s passion led him to publish seven books of his expansive images — and his vision for the FotoFocus Biennial proves equally as sweeping. Following 2012’s inaugural outing, Schiff and his team, including executive director Mary Ellen Goeke and newly appointed artistic director Kevin Moore, have done their due diligence in suffusing the city of Cincinnati with “lens-based art” for the month of October — whether integrating exhibitions into local institutions, transforming abandoned buildings into white cube galleries, or even sliding art photographs into the ad space on several of the city’s bus stops. All told, FotoFocus comprises exhibitions at 50 participating venues scattered throughout the region, from museums to galleries to universities, in addition to hosting a series of lectures and screenings scheduled throughout the month.

Still, it’s worth noting that the biennial’s participant roster has slimmed somewhat from the first edition, following the introduction of an application process (before, inclusion in “FotoFocus” had been open to just about every institution that expressed interest). The event’s change in nomenclature, from 2012’s plain “FotoFocus” to the somewhat more haute-sounding “biennial,” is also notable, as is the introduction of Moore’s curatorial eye with his six central exhibitions. Though Moore’s organizing theme, “Photography in Dialogue,” encourages the medium to run up against its various formal tenets by, say, putting still images in conversation with film, one of the biennial’s most rewarding exchanges is between the international and local artists. United under the FotoFocus program, for example, the elaborate multimedia installation of Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs runs parallel to the slice-of-life prints from three local women photographers that decorate the upper floor of the YWCA, evoking not only photography’s scope of form, but of effect.

With more than $829 million invested in downtown Cincinnati’s development in the past decade, it’s possible to imagine that the city’s smattering of empty brown-papered storefronts might soon be overtaken, perhaps even permanently “white-cubed” — just as the biennial’s promised 2016 edition will likely draw even more cutting-edge works from around the globe. In the meantime, we’ve rounded up our top seven must-see works at this year’s FotoFocus Biennial.  

“Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs: The One-Eyed Thief” at the Contemporary Arts Center

Walking into Onarato and Krebs’s first-ever US exhibition can be a bit disconcerting — if not for the eerie, trompe l’oeil nature of their photographs, then at least for the sound installation lurking in an alcove just behind the elevator: a machine rigged to whack mallets against metal and glass at varying intervals. These intermittent clangs serve as an appropriately disjointed soundtrack for what amounts to a mini-retrospective of sorts, from three of their latest series: “The Great Unreal,” documentary shots from several US road trips; “Constructions,” in which they built wooden structures to mimic outlines of Berlin buildings and subsequently set them on fire; and “Spins,” in which motion blur turns geometric forms into supernatural cyclones. Though perhaps denotatively disparate, Moore’s selection of the duo’s work feels united by an overriding sense of cheekiness — see also: the artists’ series of sculptures that shove camera lenses into stacks of books and turtle shells, testing the boundaries of the biennial’s establishing credo of “lens-based art.”

“David Benjamin Sherry: Western Romance” at 1500 Elm Street

His large-scale monochrome landscapes seem like they could be created through a quick click of Photoshop’s “Colorize” function, but David Benjamin Sherry does all of his work the hard way, with an 8x10 film camera and manipulation of CMYK chemicals — he makes sure to refer to his works as “traditional color darkroom photographs,” so as to emphasize the painstaking, old-school nature of his process. Perhaps to commemorate this fact, under Moore’s curatorial direction, Sherry’s works are hung next those of the original landscape greats, such as Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, and Edward Weston. “I’ve always kind of been into the melodrama of photography,” Sherry said in a panel discussion— and indeed, especially when set alongside his predecessors’ smaller-format black and white prints, the bright, massive images take on all the more zeal. “It’s amazing to think how limited Edward Weston was by this format and size,” said Moore. But, as he pointed out, it’s perhaps even more a testament to Weston and his ilk that their works still hold their own. (Sherry’s additional work, meanwhile, is on view at Salon 94 in Manhattan.)

“Paris Night & Day” at the Taft Museum

Harking back to some of photography’s earliest explorations, this exhibition presents classic examples from 19th-century Paris — from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s spontaneous yet exquisitely composed “decisive moments” to Man Ray’s staged and solarized nudes, with Ilse Bing’s self-portraits and Brassaï’s brothel shots in between. For photo-tech buffs, the hall is also dotted with examples of actual Leica and Bergheil cameras, along with wall text detailing early development processes.

“Eyes on the Street” at the Cincinnati Art Museum

In the age of the iPhone and the surveillance camera, perhaps no photographic genre is quite so ubiquitous as “street photography” — an area that receives a refreshingly multifaceted treatment in this exhibition. Those who missed James Nares’s mesmerizing “Street” at the Metropolitan Museum last year have another chance to watch the achingly high-def, slow-mo capture of a typical day on 34th Street, flanked by works from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s infamous “Heads” series — including the photograph an Orthodox Jewish man that sparked 2006’s landmark ruling protecting street photography as “artistic expression.”

“Stills” at Michael Lowe Gallery

John Waters’s filmstrip reminiscent “Inga #3,” 1994, has been generating a great deal of buzz — especially in light of his performance during the biennial’s opening weekend — but the real show-stealers of “Stills” are downstairs at Michael Lowe Gallery. There, visitors will find Moyra Davey’s wall-sized grid of candidly snapped “Subway Riders I,” 2011, each creased and postmarked as a letter, alongside the vibrant sidewalk drama of Paul Graham’s large-format diptych “34th Street, 4th June 2010, 3.12.58 pm,” 2010. “It’s like a two-frame movie,” said Nion McEvoy, CEO of Chronicle Books, who loaned the majority of the exhibition from his personal collection. “You see them each individually, as resonant with each other, and then you see them as sequential.”

“Screenings” at Lightborne Studios

Following “Stills” to its logical conclusion, “Screenings” presents a complementary set of eight art films, which Moore originally put together for this past year’s edition of Paris Photo LA — from “I’m Gonna,” 1996, Martha Colburn’s three-minute poetry-spliced re-edit of an Australian action movie to Moyra Davey’s “Les Goddesses,” 2011, an hour-long self-expository meditation on English writer Mary Wollestoncraft. Once the program has run its course, visitors would be remiss not to pop next door to check out the rest of Lightborne, Thomas Schiff’s film studio, designed by José Garcia — also the hand behind FotoFocus’s tent-like “Arthub” erected in Washington Park. The lobby alone is worth a look, outfitted with a curving ramp and freestanding staircase in sleek warehouse-style concrete, and decked out with hand-blown, locally crafted light fixtures.

“Vivian Maier: A Quiet Pursuit” at 1400 Elm Street

Since the discovery of Vivian Maier’s photographic trove in 2007, much has been made of the then-unknown nanny’s work — including a book, a documentary, and now some ongoing legal hay. Moore’s FotoFocus show, however, represents what he deemed “one of the first interpretive exhibitions of her work,” for which he’s pulled together a collection of Maier’s reflective-surface self-portraits, with a particular focus on her depictions of other women that include some shadow of her presence in the frame. “There’s some sort of interesting psychological need to be in proximity to other people, women especially, but also to be separate,” Moore said, “and her camera — her activity as a photographer — allows her to negotiate that.”

“Foxcatcher” and “Birdman,” both of which I saw in the final stretch of the New York Film Festival, which ended on October 12, could not be more different from one another. Aside from both being products of Hollywood and representing distinct strains of late-in-the-year awards-contending releases — the “we’re very serious” film and the “we can laugh at ourselves” film — both diverge in ways that are not immediately clear, notably that one is thought-provoking underneath a quiet surface while the other is a hollow and banal redemption story hidden behind a scrim of complication.

Let’s start with “Birdman,” because it represents a type of film that gets on my nerves more than most. Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor most famous for playing the title superhero, and who walked away after the second sequel. Now, Thomson’s on Broadway, writing and directing and starring in the self-financed production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” based on the short story by Raymond Carver, and it’s not going well. The actors are not getting along (some are veering on the edge of craziness), Thomson’s fresh-out-of-rehab daughter won’t stop causing trouble, and the line between fact-and-fiction is beginning to blur.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Birdman” seems to have mistaken technical wizardry for substance. Most of the movie gives off the appearance of being filmed in one long, winding take, with the camera moving through backstage hallways, in and out of dressing rooms, and roaming around the stage with the actors as they rehearse and perform the play. It’s not much different from how many of Iñárritu’s previous films — “Babel” or “21 Grams,” for instance — confused the tri-or-quadfurcation of the narrative, with the various strands held together by flimsy links, as a marker for profoundness. It works like a magic trick — it seems amazing until you recognize the mechanics and realize the rest is just smoke and mirrors.

“Birdman” is a Hollywood film made for people in Hollywood, filled with jokes about how crazy and narcissistic actors can be, and how much critics stink. It has things it wants to say about identity and the impossibility of capturing truth, but these things get lost in the tangled mess of characters and camera work and lame jokes. “Foxcatcher,” on the other hand, is mannered in comparison. Directed by Bennett Miller (“Capote”), the film details the true story of John du Pont (Steve Carell), heir to his family’s fortune, and his tragic relationship with sibling wrestlers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, respectively). Miller, through an economy of camera movement and narrative details, has crafted a quiet, physical, and almost subdued portrait that embraces ambiguity.

It comes down to a simple idea: one film tries to cram everything into a short timeframe, while the other realizes the futileness of that approach. “Foxcatcher” is as much about silence as “Birdman” is about noise. Both deal with emotionally unstable figures, but one is trying to mirror that turmoil through clutter while the other conveys it through an almost minimalist presentation.

Ultimately, the differences in the ways “Birdman” and “Foxcatcher” operate are most clearly visible in their settings. One is located in Manhattan, smack in the middle of Times Square, while the other is located in the drab country hills of Pennsylvania — both backgrounds inform the films’ visual and narrative style. “Foxcatcher” is constructed around the stillness of the du Pont estate, a world of porcelain dolls closed off from the rest of society, and its power comes from what is not said. “Birdman” runs on the buzz of Broadway — it’s as trivial as the Great White Way’s worst shows, all bright lights and showbiz allure.