Commonwealth and Council presents “To The Torrid Sea I Fall,” an exhibition of Vanessa Conte's new paintings and drawings of the female body subjected to unidentifiable forces and faceless domination. Amidst a tumultuous time when the female body is politicized, celebrated, shamed, and reclaimed in public discourse, Conte’s work poses questions about the vulnerable shell of the human form, its disposition to surrender to impulses of human nature and depravity, and our reactions as bystanders, voyeurs, and, at times, participants.Commonwealth and Council presents “The Melancholy Spring,” an exhibition of new work by Ariane Vielmetter completed in the seasons following the 2016 election. The exhibition title refers to Wilhelm Lachnit's 1933 painting of the same name, an allegorical depiction of Spring as an exhausted, bedraggled woman wearing a crown of fresh flowers. Lachnit’s solemn depiction of Spring and her vanitas, the changing of the seasons, were perceived as threatening enough for the work to be pronounced “degenerate” by the Nazi regime. Vielmetter suggests a parallel with our present, where truth is largely mediated and distorted through a cacophony of strident, simplistic, and cavalier rhetoric in the digital sphere, suppressing any perspective which does not lend itself to the condensed parcel of a sound byte, meme, or tweet. Precious little in the way of lived experiences makes it to the legible surface, and is then further subjected to reduction or exaggeration. “Aunt Clara’s Dilemma” is an exhibition by Won Ju Lim about doorknobs, thresholds, and the moment when the old dialectic of outsides and insides becomes a mise-en-abyme. There have always been doors, and doors, in order to be opened and closed, have always been equipped with handles. Once they were carved by hand to fit back into the hand. Then machines inherited the task as a standardized ergonomic ratio. Now, the machines, having progressed to customized algorithms, deliver a handle that could directly respond to your hand. As the old model Apple computers once asked, “Where do you want to go today?”