Dancer Ann Carlson and video artist Mary Ellen Strom present “New Performance Video” at the DeCordova Museum (51 Sandy Pond Road, Lincoln, through May 17). In one installation, a naked woman in what looks like a see-through raincoat stuffed with dollar bills dances around a cow. In others, lawyers dance absurdly in an elevator lobby, or four men drag boards along a beach, drawing parallel lines in the sand that are washed away by the surf. Certain images are striking, but the choreography feels stilted and clichéd; at one point the lawyers close their eyes and hold out their arms, as if to fly. And the work is larded with social and artistic references (the guys drawing lines as a reference to the “invisible nature of their own labor as construction workers” and to ’60s Land Art) that feel underdeveloped and inbred.
Instead, check out Georgie Friedman’s Geyser at Boston College’s Higgins Hall (140 Comm Ave, Chestnut Hill, through May 10). On two stacked televisions, she screens footage of Iceland geysers. The bottom one shows boiling water sloshing around a rocky pot until it explodes. The top shows clouds rolling by, and now and then the top of a geyser’s splash. The installation is less elaborate — and correspondingly less dramatic — than some of her past work. It ruminates on the elemental nature of our world, but what grabs is its simple, elegant, luxuriously beautiful movement.
“Nourishment” at the Art Institute of Boston (700 Beacon Street, Boston, through May 3) features work by husband and wife Jeffu Warmouth and Ellen Wetmore. Warmouth’s video installation is a satiric face-off between McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken joints. You order off interactive computer menus that feature a mix of conceptual and absurdist gags. One restaurant prepares your order (which often seems to involve Warmouth dumping a bucket of chickenish stuff on his head) while the other heckles (that guy will put anything in his burgers). A serious-silly joke about fast food and conceptual art, it’s a hoot.
Since the birth of the couple’s son a couple of years ago, Wetmore has been making work that explores pregnancy, motherhood, and nursing. Here she offers surreal wall decals riffing on motherhood and an animated neon sign of a baby falling on its head. These pieces feel a bit rote. Her funny-strange videos (her son biting off her finger, her arm catching on fire, eyes sprouting and blinking on her pregnant belly) are more affecting because of their witty special effects and the way they creep under your skin.
Curator Leslie K. Brown continues her exploration of the elements of photography by rounding up nine artists who explore “the language of digital information” in “Syntax” at the Photographic Resource Center (832 Comm Ave, Boston, through May 10). Meggan Gould offers sweet, hazy, Rothko-esque pictures made by layering Google-image-search results. Brian Piana makes brightly hued animated abstractions of Web pages based on the experience of surfing the Net. Luke Strosnider represents Ansel Adams photos via Photoshop histograms that chart the tones in the images. The graphs look like jagged mountain ranges. Some of the images are lovely — Gould’s and Piana’s in particular — but the ideas feel a bit tired. How much art must we see based on Google searches? And Strosnider’s charts are shallow, gimmicky insider jokes.
