Recent Yale grad Mary Reid Kelley struggles to be a “modern girl” in her stylized black-and-white videos on view at Fredericks & Freiser through Oct. 3. The exhibition consists of two wall-sized projections, of Kelley’s Sadie, the Saddest Sadist and The Queen’s English. Acting as all of the characters in both works, which combine live action and stop-motion animation, the artist squarely addresses the viewer with cartoonish patches over her eyes, speaking in pun-laden, sometimes rhyming, broken speech.

In the gallery's front room, Sadie, the Saddest Sadist opens in a domestic setting, with the video’s protagonist stacking cubes of sugar. The table is set for tea, with each white prop outlined in black, looking like a still-life version of a Jean Dubuffet sculpture. Behind Sadie is a “window” showing a film noir-inspired silhouette of an industrialized city.

The narration soon reveals the era to be World War I, with Sadie a British woman who decides to leave her domestic life and join the workforce. She finds work at an ammunition factory and becomes impassioned about the war, as many British suffragettes did at the time. The video then slips into stop-motion animation of white text moving over a black background, revealing a derogatory instruction Sadie’s factory foreman gives her: “Take a good grip on the means of production, relax, and let your form follow its function.”

Sadie recounts his statement with a matter-of-fact tone and an expressionless face — a passiveness that is also reflected in her body language. Although she is not physically constrained in any way, she is shown from the waist up, speaking with no gesticulations and very little torso movement. With her blackened eyes, white painted face, and slight bobbing of her head as she speaks, she looks like a human marionette. She has achieved a place in the workplace, but no power.

Her interaction with Jack, a sailor she meets on the street, also puts her in a compromised position. Wordplay in the dialogue implies a sexual encounter between the two, and the next day Sadie collapses after coming down with a sexually transmitted disease that appears as black spots up and down her arms. She continues to tell her story from the floor, reminiscing about her quest to be a “modern girl.” Her dialogue is bittersweet as she addresses directly and sadly how her power as a woman is connected to her sexuality. We are reminded of how the egalitarian feminism in Britain’s prewar years led to women entering the workforce as they filled in for the men who were away at battle, only to shift back to their domestic roles when the war ended.

At the end of the video, the camera zooms in on Sadie’s mouth; with the artist’s lips and teeth covered in black, her mouth becomes a gaping hole that overtakes the screen. The imagery brings to mind Lucio Fontanas stash paintings, Georgia O’Keeffes luminous vaginal abstractions, and the brazenness of Gustave Courbets The Origin of the World. Although Sadie has been incapacitated by the war and the sailor, she leaves the screen with an overpowering image of female sexuality and the quip “I gave you my applause, and you gave me the clap.”

The Queen’s English, shown in the gallery’s slightly smaller second room, also deals with how the women’s movement was sidelined by the onset of modernism and the First World War. The video chronicles the death of a soldier, as observed by a nurse, another common occupation for women during the war years. While Sadie employs many visual allusions to fragmentation through its modern, almost Cubist look, The Queen’s English uses its own form of fragmentation with its imagery of severed hands dancing around the screen. There's also the occupation of an army nurse, who would have seen not only amputations but many other ways in which a body can be torn apart. The videos' theme of a fragmented worldview draws attention to the choice of a World War I setting, a time when ideas about modernism and industrialization would shift dramatically.

The video’s aesthetic could be taken from the notebook of Albrecht Dürer. Again, the entire video is done in black and white. The main character has a white face with a painted hairline, bug-like painted patches over her eyes, and cross-hatching lines on her face and neck. The visual representation of a Renaissance artwork come to life makes a strong statement, contrasting gender roles in that period with those in the modern era.

Kelley's sets and costumes are considered and intricate, but so highly stylized that one is immediately aware of the synthetic environment. She takes on historical themes through video, a modern medium, but with outmoded aesthetics. But this just highlights, like the ham-handedness of her sets, how historical context influences interpretations about the way ideas like social change are received.

Like Sadie, The Queen’s English also contains some modern references in the form of Cubism, with circles, triangles, and columns inserted in the stop-motion animation, and, in the live-action scenes, lying piled around the countryside and standing in for injured soldiers in cots in an infirmary. This video also boasts absurd use of language, with an injured soldier saying to his nurse, “I love you, darling, the way a Dutchman loves a dike, the way a woman needs a man, that needs a fish that needs a bike.”

In the end, considering historical situations through the very contemporary filter of a constructed moving image — and modern sensibilities — somehow makes a lot of sense. And if the STDs, blood and guts, and historical context don’t draw you in, the protagonists’ witty, often humorous quips will.

Below, Kelley recommends a few gallery shows to check out in New York this weekend.

1. “Silent Pictures” at the Graduate Center’s James Gallery, through Oct. 11
Co-curated by Linda Norden and Andrei Molotiu, this exhibition showcases both static and time-based approaches to sequential images. For those who like to touch their art, there are flipbooks and a row of wordless comics from Art Spiegelmans collections. Noam Elcotts awesomely educational selection of short silent films spans nearly a century (from Fritz Lang to Norman McLaren to William Kentridge). Rachel Cattle and Steve Richards’s animation Same Old Scene is the perfect contemporary embodiment of this show’s emphasis on materiality, timing, and evolution.

2. Matthew Weinstein at Sonnabend, through Oct. 17
The experience of Matthew Weinstein’s video Chariots of the Gods is one of extreme sensory saturation. Natasha Richardsons opulent voice, emanating from a 3-D-animated fish, lectures on scientific and mystical topics in a level of detail matched by the interior scene’s furniture, mirrors, and dishes. Occasionally everything explodes. It’s one of the best uses of 3-D animation I’ve seen.

3. “The Girl Effect” at Lombard-Freid Projects, through Oct. 10
Take a friend with you to this show so you can match wits over Yara El-Sherbinis super-fun A Rather Trivial Pursuit, with questions written by the artist that reflect the show’s focus on women and girls as agents of social change. (Hint: If you want to win, read Nicholas Kristofs recent New York Times series on the same subject, though it won’t help you with this one: "Is the moon made out of cheese?") Also in this exhibition is Lauren Kelleys riveting stop-motion animation Big Gurl, starring a cast of Barbies who don’t live in the Mansion.

4. “George Grosz: The Years in America: 1933–1958 at David Nolan, through Oct. 31
This exhibition covers Grosz’s years in America, where he sought refuge from the Nazis’ rising political power in the early 1930s. In The Grey Man Dances, an oil painting from 1949, a tragicomic military figure performs a tortured jig amid piles of barbed wire, his body bursting open old wounds held together by screws. A selection of collages and ink drawings graphically display Grosz’s talent for combining the comic and brutal.

5. Kara Walker and Mark Bradford at Sikkema Jenkins, through Oct. 17
Speaking directly to the political zeitgeist, Kara Walker’s text pieces evoke the mob and its bureaucratic counterparts. Mark Bradford’s alliterative text drawings supply the chanting voice of advertising slogans. Angry mobs and their victims are also the subject of Walker’s new videos, in which her astonishingly expressive puppets are the victims and perpetrators of terrifying violence.