Mr. Wall also delivers moments of uninhibited sentimentality, beauty and transcendence, albeit in unexpected settings like a CrossFit gym. In his previous works, these encounters have usually been laced with social critique (as in his images of homeless people and day laborers) and/or leavened with physical comedy (a spurt of milk, a wind-tossed sheaf of papers).

The sweeping triptych “I giardini/The Gardens” (2017), which takes up an entire wall of the capacious single-room installation, exemplifies all of these shifts. Set in the lush gardens of the Villa Silvio Pellico near Turin, Italy, it’s a kind of three-act play on the theme of expulsion from paradise in which a man and woman in late middle age inhabit multiple roles (or just multiply themselves, in a confounding doppelgänger effect that owes something to digital editing). In the final image they stand knee-deep in a neatly pruned hedge labyrinth, reading from a printed script or manifesto.

Another eerie doubling occurs in the diptych “Pair of interiors” (2018), which shows a man and woman having some kind of communication breakdown in a drab beige setting that might be a hotel room or a couples’ therapist’s office. This time, however, Mr. Wall uses two different couples who resemble each other just enough to imply continuity between the two images.