The mischievous tone is set by Mark Flood’s “Twilight Feelings” (2010), a distorted, mosaic-style portrait of the vampire-franchise heartthrob Robert Pattinson. Using multiple copies of the same photograph, Mr. Flood gives the actor a giraffelike neck and sharply protruding chin.
Older works by Bruce Conner and Jess remind you that the Beat era gave rise to many renegade collagists. In Jess’s riotous “Untitled (With Joan Crawford Head)” (1952-3), you can see not only Crawford, but also a reproduction of a Marsden Hartley painting and a photograph of a bat devouring a lizard.
Works by Erik Foss, Leo Fitzpatrick and Gee Vaucher stand out for their relative simplicity. So do black-and-white self-portraits by Jack Walls, who slices photographs of himself into arcs and strips and arranges them on Op Art backgrounds. The groovy, graphic results completely transform the original pictures, which were taken by Mr. Walls’s longtime boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe.
Swoon and the collective Faile contribute studious examples of the street-art genre. But small pieces by Shepard Fairey and Dash Snow are wearisome. An image or artifact from one of the “Hamster’s Nests” (rooms of shredded phone books) inhabited by Mr. Snow and his hard-partying cohorts would have pushed the show in a less predictable, and just as rebellious, direction. KAREN ROSENBERG
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