Eileen Quinlan - "Curtains" - NYTimes.com 36 Orchard Street, between Canal and Hester Streets, Lower East Side Through Dec. 8 Eileen Quinlan mixes portraiture, cameraless photography and performance to mesmerizing effect in her latest solo show, which coincides with an appearance in the Museum of Modern Art's "New Photography 2013." The differing forces are contained in the stark, deceptively casual-looking installation, a row of unframed gelatin silver prints held up by pins. "Passing Through," which shows an inky void with ruffled edges, is typically complex; it's based on a famous Gutai performance by the artist Saburo Murakami, who hurled himself through a wall of 42 sheets of paper, leaving his image behind. In Ms. Quinlan's version, a documentary photograph of the event becomes the basis for a similarly violent gesture in the darkroom; she peels away the emulsion layer from the middle of the negative, obliterating the figure. Elsewhere, she attacks her film with steel wool or embraces accidents in the development process, producing scratched-up portraits like "Sister" or marbleized abstractions like "The Blade." The two categories sometimes mingle, as in the viscous-looking work "Failed Portrait." Ms. Quinlan isn't alone in treating the photograph as a space for, rather than a document of, performance. But with her devotion to analog processes, she suggests that the action may happen well after the picture is taken.