Sarah Sze

Through Oct. 19. Tanya Bonakdar, 521 West 21st Street, Manhattan, 212-414-4144, tanyabonakdargallery.com.

Sarah Sze, who has taken over all the spaces at Tanya Bonakdar, is considering her options. She continues to excel as a conjurer of enchanting labor-intensive multimedia environments, as evidenced by “Crescent (Timekeeper),” one of the most beautiful installations of her career. Its shimmering metal scaffolding resembles a magnificent building, and is alive with scores of small moving images projected (somewhat miraculously) onto pieces of paper the size of snapshots. More moving images float past on the walls; the overall effect is of being inside an enormous magic lantern or aquarium.

But Ms. Sze has other things on her mind. In the front of the gallery, two installations — “Images in Refraction [East]” and “Images in Refraction [West]” — suggest works in progress. “West,” the more interesting of the two, presents a loose combination of still images taped to the wall and identical moving versions that come and go. They establish motifs that recur throughout the show: an empty highway; a fox crossing a road; hands kneading dough; an erupting volcano.

And in the back space, the installation “After Studio” re-creates the artist’s somewhat disheveled work space — an unnecessary “bridge” in the show’s narrative. It also interferes with seeing the collaged and painted works on view, which try to evoke the complexity of the environments , but in two dimensions. Most are wintry in tone, with an image of a tiny flame at the center, except for “Surround Sound (After Studio),” an imposing work that pushes bits of fiery orange to the edges. Three similar but more finished efforts dominate the proceedings upstairs. With them, Ms. Sze heads bravely into unknown territory, in search, it seems, of hybrid surfaces that allow her love of the delicate, the ephemeral and the salvaged to have a new, more permanent form of expression. ROBERTA SMITH