Downtown

Jim Jenkins makes small kinetic sculptures from colorful stick people with limbs hinged and electrically controlled. You turn them on and watch them jump and jig, tap and toil endlessly. The choreography has a perverse existential twist. In “Closure Variation,” a poor chap brings the last unclosed corner of a frame shape together to form a completed square. Just as he’s about to complete the task, he abruptly pulls the open corner apart again only to repeat the whole frustrating cycle. The same predicament faces a sailor who slowly, methodically rows over waves formed by endlessly undulating wood slats. The pace gets giddy in “Ashan and Wan” as stick people hang from gallows shaking and jittering convulsively at regular intervals. Though a near-life-size kinetic installation along the same lines lacks the whimsy of small works, the show is entertaining. (Koslow Rayl Fine Art, 2538 W. 7th St., to June 18.)