Galleries: Locks is transformed into a movie theater of sorts

Why go to the Ritz Five when you can hang out at Locks?

Downstairs, you can perch on a cube, don headphones, and become hypnotized by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib's baffling but beautiful 1967, a multichannel video installation loosely inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise, in which five French university students living in the same apartment as members of a Maoist cell plot the assassination of a Soviet dignitary. Hironaka and Suib have imagined their own sort of subplot to the Godard film, in which Veronique, the Mao-besotted female protagonist of Godard's film, travels to Montreal to wreak havoc on the 1967 World Exposition. But 1967 has no clear-cut narrative. You, the viewer, move your eyes from one projected image to another and try to fill in the blanks.

This is the most complex presentation of images I've seen by the husband-and-wife team (with help from contributors C. Spencer Yeh and Aaron Moore), a crisscrossing of original video, footage from La Chinoise, from Montreal's 1967 World Exposition and Shanghai's in 2010, clips from films made during China's Cultural Revolution, and YouTube-sourced video of protests. After three visits to 1967, I admired it more than I liked it.

Upstairs, New York art critic and independent curator Lilly Wei has assembled "True Fiction," a program of documentary films by nine filmmakers/video artists - six shorts, two feature-lengths, and one real-time. Over the course of three visits to Wei's program, I saw only four shorts, one of the features and part of another, and the real-time, 30-day, single-channel video by Jan Tichy, Project Cabrini Green, 2011.

The films that made the strongest impression were British artist Tracey Emin's How It Feels (1996), her brutally frank first-person account of a botched abortion; Amy Grappell's engrossing Quadrangle (2009), about her parents' affair with another couple; and Simon Leung's sympathetic and fascinating documentary of Warren Niesluchowski, an art-world habitué and professional guest.

Leave your popcorn at the door.

Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. www.locksgallery.com or 215-629-1000. Through Feb. 25.

Bright and beautiful

Paintings as outgoing as Federico Herrero's huge, vividly colored abstracts at Bridgette Mayer Gallery could be painted on a bus or a wall or on the bottom of a pool - and sometimes they are.