How do you preserve a work whose medium is rooted in ephemerality? How does a work retain its performance-ness (as opposed to the video-ness, photograph-ness, object-ness, etc. of standard documentation) fifty years down the road? These questions are on full display in Chris Burden: Cross Communication, an exhibition featuring documentation of twenty-two performances from 1971–80, without presuming to contain the answers.

Waiting for the Bell, Andrew Cranston’s first solo show in New York at Karma, presents a new direction in scale for his dreamlike and beautiful paintings. The show is split in two distinct sections: one contains many of Cranston’s small paintings on book covers, which he is known for; the other includes eight large-scale paintings on canvas. These are the standout works in the show. Each has a restrictive color palette and depicts simple, oddly familiar and sparsely populated landscapes. A sense of stillness prevails over everything.

At first glance the works appear graphic, with bright swaths of color laid down on flat backgrounds. There are few immediately recognizable forms with the exception of two compositions resembling genitalia.