The American artist Charles Gaines, who has long questioned established systems of representation, creates art that explores constructions of meaning. In 1978, he began his “Faces” series, in which he photographed faces of many races and transcribed them, using acrylic paint on plexiglass. “The most fundamental question, of course, is why are white people white and black people black?” he once asked. “And why are white people treated better than black people?” For this exhibition, a continuation of the “Faces” series, Gaines pushes further into his exploration of identity. Meanwhile, his “Numbers and Trees” series features different tree species rendered and analyzed with the same gridwork technique. —E.C.