The works of performance artist Robert Ladislas Derr are spare, subdued and smart. They are also witty, dry and even sometimes funny. In “Structures and Strictures,” he features three pared–down video documentations of his performances—along with accompanying photographs.

In each work, Derr uses his active body to bring focus to the abstract structures and strictures of a site. Cerebral and quiet formal explorations on the one hand, they also metaphorically express the artist’s existential searching for a connection with society and himself.

Concrete Intervention is a two-channel video of the artist repeatedly crawling through a pair of concrete culverts. His movements are defined by the round, constricted shape of the space. Breaking down the wider environment to a simple structure, it conveys the monotony of daily life. His repetitions allude to the daily cycle that we repeat each and every day.

In the second two-channel video Existential Dilemma , Derr and his wife appear flipping around inside the containment of adjacent cubes. Here, he’s thinking about another aspect of the human condition: No matter how hard we try to be close to another human being, we will always be separated both psychologically and physiologically.

I don’t give a shit about the masses is a durational video performance showing Derr in the forest, struggling to hold a headstand against a tree. Breaking a gender specific way of seeing Mother Nature in art, he identifies the art historical structure of landscape nudes that have traditionally been female. Derr is “lost in the wilderness” (a notion he borrows from Thoreau). In exile, alone in the woods and away from the distraction of the masses and their collective insanities, he literally turns his world upside-down. He is trying to remember himself.

Robert Ladislas Derr has performed and exhibited worldwide. This is his second New York solo show. Derr received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an assistant professor of photography at The Ohio State University.