The German-born, Miami-based artist Dara Friedman makes striking, short art movies using traditional color film as well as video. Ms. Friedman studied filmmaking in both Europe and America, and her practice cleverly splices experimental and mainstream elements of 20th-century cinema from those respective cultures.

Ms. Friedman’s structural approach to filmmaking treats sound, vision, and temporal flow as separate tracks, so that what unfolds as a movie is also experienced as a composite or montage rather than a linear narrative. An illustrious roster of artists and filmmakers have made color films in this vein, including Joseph Cornell, Rudy Burckhardt, Kenneth Anger, and Jonas Mekas. Ms. Friedman’s acclaimed past works have featured simple, repetitive subjects including couples kissing in a park in Rome (“Romance,” 2001), bells tolling out of synch with the soundtrack (“Toll,” 2002), and attractive women ripping open their shirts to the sound of gun fire (“Chrissy, Mette, Kristan,” 2000). The more the seams show, as it were, the more vividly film’s materiality and independence from linear time are displayed to the viewer.

Ms. Friedman’s most recent work, “Tigertail” (2007), departs from the conceptual approach of her earlier work in order to concentrate upon a most lyrical subject: idyllic childhood playtime. “Tigertail” was shot in 16mm color film, and a good part of its charm lies in its flickering evocation of a home-movie dream world. Soft focus visions of active little girls, close-ups of colorful flowers, and a variety of domestic and wild animals are woven together over the course of 13 minutes.

Soon after the film begins, a large bell sounds, and a child levitates from a forest floor. Pink foxglove nods in the wind while the bell tolls. From time to time, a young man sipping a beer appears. In one mesmerizing sequence shot from above, a toddler runs along a spiral maze outlined by coconuts halfburied in the forest floor; her delight in her own athleticism is matched by the cinematographer’s steady gaze. Galloping horses, a peacock, goldfish, a cat, and a frog appear intermittently. A silhouetted figure climbs over a wall, the footage repeating in red, purple, and yellow monochrome light. Night falls, and a child’s sleeping face is dimly illuminated by a bright candle near the lens. Crickets thrum, and the horse’s wary eye gleams up from the gloom. The next morning, there are two little girls trodding the grass in wooden clogs.

While “Tigertail” continuously runs in an open room, Ms. Friedman’s large and small mixed-media sculptures and paintings are on view elsewhere the gallery. These works are suggestive of keyholes, reflections, and displacement. They reflect the imaginative themes of “Tigertail” without creating much magic of their own.

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Kevin Landers is a sculptor and photographer whose casual yet obsessive study of the urban environment dates from the early 1990s. In fringe neighborhoods of New York, and occasionally those of international cities, Mr. Landers has trained his lens upon street grates, Laundromats, newspaper stands, and bodega wares. The camera’s power to observe situations and document colorful patterns is an essential part of the artist’s distillation of street culture from the sidewalk to his studio.

A 17-year retrospective of Mr. Landers’s color photographs on view through this weekend at Elizabeth Dee Gallery gathers together more than 50 vintage color prints of varying shapes and sizes. They hang by clips, salon-style. The informal presentation echoes the commonplace subject matter, and the viewer may experience the show as a walk-in sculptor’s sketchbook.

On occasion, Mr. Landers has engaged his practice with the fluid social boundaries of illegal vending by purchasing, say, a threecard monty stand from the cardshark who built it, or a coffee cup that someone used to collect small change. Back in the studio, he carefully photographs these objects like forensic specimens in a bright white laboratory, then prints them larger than life-size. They submit to the photographic interrogation while basking in a fresh identity conferred by the fine art context.

Serenely composed object studies in the front gallery are followed by a second room featuring street scenes and the occasional passerby. The back room contains portraits that double as sight gags: In one, a woman in a Laundromat presses her naked breast against the dryer’s porthole glass door. As if to escalate the sense of touch and taboo, these portraits hang near motifs of entrapment such as birdcages, chain-link fencing, and hair curlers.

Deadpan and witty at first glance, the photographs’ cumulative effect is that of a microcosm all their own. Urban happenstance, trash, and babes map a loose terrain where the artist fragments notions of value — be they artistic intellectual capital, retail consumerism, or illicit transactions — in order to reshuffle them like cards in a game of three-card monty. Whether that effort springs from a gleeful or world-weary critique of art-making and art-marketing, it clearly stokes Mr. Landers’s imagination.

Friedman until May 12 (620 Greenwich St. at LeRoy Street, 212-627-5258);

Landers until May 7 (545 W. 20th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-924-7545).