Teen-agers didn't exist as a sociological category in Puritan New
England, but the devoted teenophile de Beer doesn't let that stop her.
Where previous installations mined the sex-, drugs-, and fantasy-fuelled
lives of adolescents behind closed bedroom doors, "The Quickening"
imagines a more repressed, authoritarian era. The shag carpet and
beanbags remain; the video is saturated with gothic horror-movie imagery
and psychosexual overtones. But there's something more sober about this
work, perhaps in its invocation of Jonathan Edwards's 1741 sermon
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In musing about sin-as well as
about fashion and raging hormones-de Beer seems, one might almost say,
more mature. Through Jan. 10. (Boesky, 509 W. 24th St. 212-680-9889.)