All images courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery.

Just. (Courtesy Peter Funch)

Sitting in Zinque, a boho hippie wine bar in Venice, Calif., Jesper Just, with his piercing blue eyes and disheveled blond hair, looked more like a surfer dude than an artist whose famously open-ended narrative films grace the collections of world-class museums like the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern and MoMA, and who was recently chosen to represent Denmark in the 2013 Biennale—in that other Venice. This was in late July, and the Danish-born, New York-based 37-year-old had just spent a few days filming in Llano Del Rio, a long-deserted socialist community in the Antelope Valley outside Los Angeles. He’d come to Zinque to discuss that film, Llano, that will have its world premiere in an exhibition opening at New York’s James Cohan Gallery on September 6—along with two other new films getting their New York premieres—but he gave the impression that he’d prefer the content of his work to remain at least partly ambiguous.

This year is a big one for Jesper Just (pronounced Yesper Yust), who came to the attention of American art audiences in 2005 with his elaborate live opera, True Love is Yet to Come, the highlight of that year’s first-ever Performa biennial in New York. It featured one live singer, Baard Owe, familiar from Lars von Trier’s films, performing against a backdrop of filmed singers that included 20 members of the Finnish Screaming Men’s Choir. Performa’s director, Rose Lee Goldberg, had discovered Mr. Just’s work through a film at his first New York solo show, at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, the previous year. The new show at James Cohan Gallery, whose roster he joined last year, is his first in New York since “Romantic Delusions,” an exhibition of his films at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. The show is the product of travels far and wide; aside from Llano, there is the title film, This Nameless Spectacle, shot in Paris’s Parc des Buttes Chaumont, and Sirens of Chrome, shot in downtown Detroit’s Michigan Theatre, which has been turned into a three-level parking structure (ironically, they kept all the original ornamentation). Place is important in all of the artist’s films. In the world according to Mr. Just, characters are integral, but also, in some fundamental way, incidental—and they tend to remain, to a certain degree, ciphers. It is the location that is paramount. “I always start with the location,” he said at Zinque. “From there, I build an idea related to social and cinematic conventions of space.”

Llano depends for much of its effect on its bleak setting. “It’s a ruin of a place that is no longer, but also a place that really never happened,” he said. “It has a bit of a double meaning—a bizarre mix of utopia and dystopia, filled with failure as well as potent ideals.” Job Harriman, a socialist, devised the town in 1913 after he ran for mayor of Los Angeles and lost. Water supply was unreliable, and his town didn’t survive for long; it’s been deserted for almost a century.

Still from 'This Nameless Spectacle' (2011) by Just. (Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery)

In the film, rain drums on metal debris in this former utopia, even as the sun shines brightly. A heavyset woman appears among the ruins, and it soon becomes clear that it only rains where she is working. “The rain is another layer of the story,” said Mr. Just. “In my work, everything performs—characters and place, and maybe not in a way you’d expect.” He is interested in how the ruins got that way. “A ruin only becomes a ruin because of time and weather, and so it makes this almost look like a monument that is destroying itself. I’m making it look like stones are falling off the wall she is working on.” (He paused and, with a smile, added, “FYI, I am not destroying any ruins”: no artifacts were harmed in the making of this artwork.) The solitary woman repeatedly picks up the stones and attempts to put them back in place. “It’s very much like the story of Sisyphus—there is no beginning, no end,” he said. The effect is reinforced by the fact that, in the Cohan gallery, the film plays on a loop. “It is more conceptual; it is not about her emotions, it is about her accepting her fate.”

The film cuts to a dark underground engine room where machines oozing liquid are revealed to be the source of the rain destroying the structures above. These elements, Mr. Just explained, are related to the town’s history. “The original design was by a woman named Alice Austin ... It was supposed to have homes without kitchens—there would be one main kitchen in the center of town. The town would be a circular design, connected with tunnels to the main kitchen—and it was all to free the women from doing housework; they would have time for themselves. But they never got to build the actual tunnels.”

In Llano, “The tunnels we move through ... do not seem to serve or set free the woman seeking to conserve the Llano del Rio ruin. On the contrary, the tunnels and the machine pumps they contain appear to be her number one enemy as they ensure the steady fall of rain on the ruin she seems intent to save.”

Llano has something of a science fiction element to it. It may, he said, be more conceptual than his other films. “Here’s this weird monument out in the desert, and it’s continuously destroying itself while somehow this girl is trying to rebuild it.”

Still, like his previous films, it is related to the Dogme 95 Collective created in the mid-1990s by fellow Danes Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Harking back to the traditional values of story and theme, Dogme resulted in films like Mr. Vinterberg’s seminal work, The Celebration, which adhered to various strident rules established by the group, including shooting entirely on location and no use of superficial action or special effects. Mr. Just may be an avant-garde artist, but he is also a Dogme-style traditionalist.

Stylistically, his oeuvre could also be considered similar to that of auteurs like David Lynch and Terrence Malick, both of whom he admires. “Most films made here,” he said, meaning Hollywood, “have to be tested and checked and put before groups—[so] that you’re sure that everyone understands everything that is going on ... and if someone doesn’t get it, or understand it, the film changes. The way someone like David Lynch works, and how I work, it’s the opposite; it’s like a question as opposed to an answer—you don’t tell people; you are asking them ... and hopefully they are more confused after. It’s easy to make something strange and weird, but what Lynch is so good at is, even though you have no clue what’s going on onscreen, he makes you feel you understand this micro-narrative he is telling—because it’s recognizable.”

Interviewing him in Los Angeles felt at once appropriate and incongruous: while he does borrow from Hollywood’s polished filmmaking techniques, he subverts the stereotypes associated with the mainstream film industry. He sees his films as a series of open moments that keep breaking clichés. “Hopefully,” he said, “it will make the viewer ask him/herself, ‘What is it I’m actually watching?’”

Still from 'This Nameless Spectacle' (2011) by Just. (Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery)

The Cohan show’s centerpiece, This Nameless Spectacle, is a two-channel film that takes its title from a line in William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Right of Way.” It centers on a wheelchair-bound woman in her 60s played by Marie-France, a well-known French actress and ’70s pop icon who happens to be a transsexual. “Her gender is not directly important to the story,” said Mr. Just. “But I like her because she had several layers built in, [and] I placed her in this romantic park—a magical, artificially created piece of nature, mirroring her in the questions of what is nature and what is culture.” In the exhibition, the film is set up on two panoramic screens. On one is Marie-France, and on the other, a younger man who is following her. In order to watch the film, the viewer must stand between them. “Every time they interact—if she’s turning her head to see—she’s looking at him, but you will get the feeling that she is looking at you at the same time. You’re caught in the middle.”

In the final scene, she escapes her pursuer ... or does she? Once inside her home, she is hit by a beam of light from a window in an adjacent building—she appears to be blinded by it—and it is eventually revealed that the light results from her young pursuer manipulating his windowpane. “She goes into something like a seizure when being hit by the light, but at a certain point, it seems as if she’s also in pleasure in her attack,” said Mr. Just. “I directed it two ways—the first day, I directed her as she went into a seizure; the second time, I told her to react as if she was having an orgasm—then I cut them together so her attack becomes this weird place between pain and pleasure.”

His project for the Danish pavilion in Venice next year, a multichannel film installation, promises even greater ambiguity. “For Venice,” he said, “My aim will be to blur the distinction between film work, architecture/place, and communication. I will blur the borders between the different mediums—let them overlap—so it becomes unclear to the audience where the ‘work’ begins and where the architecture takes over.”

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David Hammons, "KOOLAID DRAWING," 2004. Kool-Aid and pencil on paper, 43 x 29 in. (© The artist, courtesy James Cohan Gallery)

Now another Hammons Kool-Aid piece has gone on view, and this time no appointment is necessary. It's hanging in "Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday," the summer group show that Matthew Higgs organized at the James Cohan Gallery, and is filled with quick splashes of pale peach, rich blood orange, pale lime, yellow and blue. In contrast to the relaxed, soothing and mediative feel of MoMA's piece, Cohan's offering is violent, raw, almost wild. The thin pools and specks of liquid look, in places, like patches of just-dried blood.

Here the cloth hangs off the side of the terrycloth frame, cloaking only a sliver of the work. The rotund and ever-jovial Kool-Aid Man is just barely visible near the lower-right corner, sporting his huge grin and ample eyebrows. Last time he looked out of place but oddly benevolent. This time, he's faintly menacing.

Every Friday, Don't Miss It! looks at a single artwork on view in New York.

Jesper Just. (Courtesy UCIRA)

Jesper Just, who's known for video works that often include multiple screens, high production values and rich musical accompaniments, will represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale. Art Review released the news today, which was confirmed by Mr. Just's New York dealer, James Cohan Gallery. More details about his plans for the Danish pavilion will be released in coming weeks.

When Mr. Just had a one-person show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, New York Times critic Ken Johnson declared him a "still young, abundantly talented and wonderfully original artist."

Before joining Cohan, he showed with Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York. His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Tate and the Israel Museum.

Update, May 23: The James Cohan Gallery will have a show with Mr. Just from Sept. 6 to Oct. 27, which will feature the New York premiere of two of his works, Sirens of Chrome (2010) filmed in Detroit and This Nameless Spectacle (2011)

(Photo from UCIRA)

Ms. Smith with her work. (Cohan Gallery)

Someone tell dealers James and Jane Cohan to take a relaxing day off. Their VIP Art Fair 2.0 is taking place at the moment, but they still found time to mail a news release saying that they will now work with New York artist Shinique Smith, who previously showed in New York with Yvon Lambert. (Lambert shuttered its Chelsea branch last year, but still represents Ms. Smith in Paris.)

Here's the James Cohan Gallery on the artist's work:

"In works made from the class of objects we call ‘belongings,’ Smith collides the intractable hard geometry and hard thinking that defines urban existence—what Paul D. Miller called 'cubes of consciousness' in a 2010 catalogue essay—with the softening, emotionally steeped influence of the worn-down, nostalgic or forgotten."

Ms. Smith is perhaps best known for assemblages that she makes out of brightly colored pieces of found fabric, which she binds or ties together, working them into unusual shapes that she hangs from ceilings, spans across walls or deposits on the floor. She paints, too, in a virtuosic gestural style, often directly on the walls of her installations.

Ms. Smith has had one-person shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the University Galleries at Illinois State University, in Normal, Ill. and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. If you're in the mood to see her work right now, you can head over to the VIP Art Fair, where her Milan gallery, Brand New, is showing one of her pieces.

"Videobytes," in the left window, at Russ & Daughters. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

“When I was naïve and I thought I could fight destiny, I worked in the art world, out at SFMOMA,” Niki Russ Federman told Gallerist over the phone this weekend. But destiny has taken hold. Ms. Federman now owns and operates the family business, the redoubtable Lower East Side appetizing store Russ & Daughters, along with her cousin Josh Russ Tupper.

However, through Dec. 11, a touch of Ms. Federman's past career is on view in the front window of her shop in the form of a 24-hour-a-day video art show called “Videobytes,” which was organized with Chelsea and Shanghai art dealer and VIP Art Fair co-founder James Cohan, who is an old friend of Ms. Federman and a longtime Russ & Daughter devotee.

“My go to, without question, is The Heebster,” Mr. Cohan said by phone, referring to a sandwich that features whitefish and baked salmon salad with horseradish dill cream cheese. “It is the knock-down, drop-dead best sandwich I have ever had,” the dealer rhapsodized. “It is near nirvana. The horseradish cream cheese cuts the richness of the fish salad on the everything bagel. It’s almost better than a great work of art.”

On a flat-screen television in a window at the front of the store, there are works that span the history of video art, from early pieces by John Baldessari and Gordon Matta-Clark—himself a downtown food proprietor, though only briefly, as owner of SoHo’s Food restaurant in the early 1970s—to contemporary work by Hiraki Sawa and Kate Gilmore.

In Ms. Gilmore’s piece, the artist smashes clay pots, causing orange paint to splatter across the floor, like gigantic pieces of salmon roe exploding with each delicious bite of a sandwich. (This is, at least, what we thought as we visited recently, and stood outside watching the videos while eating a Daughter’s Delight, which sports Gaspe Nova and wild Alaskan salmon roe with cream cheese on a bagel.)

“That is purely suggestive,” Mr. Cohan said, laughing, when we proposed our culinary interpretation of Ms. Gilmore’s work. “The overriding theme for the show was process.” Ms. Federman agreed. “It’s not a shop you go to buy something, make a transaction and leave,” Ms. Federman said. “You see the artisanal craft of slicing. You linger, you watch. I came to appreciate Russ & Daughters as a living museum, as a theater for food.”

Ms. Federman had long been troubled by the limitations of the window where the videos on view. “How do you capture almost 100 years of history in one display?” she asked. “I think of Russ & Daughters as a gestalt, and the window is never going to cut it. I thought it would be interesting to use it to show art.” Mr. Cohan had the same idea, independently proposing a video show earlier this year while they caught up on the phone.

As the shop approaches its centennial, Ms. Federman is also thinking about its history in the area, and her shop's long connection to the arts. “The Russ daughters were here in the heyday of the vaudeville and Yiddish theaters,” she told us. “They knew all of the famous Yiddish actors, musicians, bohemians of their day. My father ran the business from the late ‘70s during the dark ages of the Lower East Side and the East Village. It was here for the artists and musicians who had the chutzpah to live down here. This is continuing a conversation that has taken place over decades.”

“Russ & Daughters has always been a center of culinary delights,” Mr. Cohan said, “but it was on the fringes for a long time. Video was also on the fringes for a long time. We have a changed universe today. This show is about tipping your hat to tradition, to people who stuck to their guns.”