In terms of offering an immediate response to major news and cultural moments, filmmakers are at a disadvantage. The medium’s demands — writing a script, hiring actors, building sets and booking exterior locations, filming the scenes, editing the outcome, and then finding a distributor — do not allow for a swift turnaround.

Yet sometimes filmmakers create stories that dovetail with current events or capture the zeitgeist in a way that seems prescient. A number of films shown last year at the Hamptons International Film Festival and now making the rounds of the awards circuit appear to have done this in their portrayal of wronged and often angry women having their say in nuanced or quite vocal ways. The fact that the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior came out the day the festival opened has given these films a contextual trajectory from those early screenings to their runs in national and international cinemas, which will culminate in Sunday’s Academy Awards.

In a recent conversation over lunch at the Maidstone in East Hampton, Anne Chaisson, the executive director of the film festival and a film producer, said that “it’s time that women’s voices are heard, period.” Addressing the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements that have been galvanizing forces over the past few months, she said she wasn’t certain if more films were addressing aligned topics this year, “but if it felt like there was more of it this year, then I’m all for it.”

At the head of the line is Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri,” which is a favorite for a best picture Oscar, after winning best drama at the Golden Globes, best film and best British film at the British Academy Film and Television Awards, and best ensemble cast from the Screen Actors Guild. Frances McDormand plays a mother whose prompting of local law enforcement to find answers for her daughter’s rape and murder evolves into an extreme showdown of wills. The role has won her most every best actress award so far this year.

Accepting his award for best original screenplay at BAFTA, Mr. McDonagh said, “What we are most proud of in this Time’s Up era is that this is a film about a woman who refuses to take any shit anymore played by a woman who’s always refused to take any shit. I’d like to thank Frances McDormand for a performance that was as unapologetic as it was fearsome.”

While the daughter of Ms. McDormand’s character was raped and it is the mother seeking justice and revenge, not the father or brother, as is often the case in such stories, Ms. Chaisson wondered if it truly captures the moment. “ ‘Three Billboards’ is more of a murder mystery to me,” she said. The rape is part of the crime, but rape has been the subject or an element of many movie stories. The taboo subject for film has been sexual assault, not rape, she said. “The idea that touching a woman in an unwelcome way is bad, most people were afraid to go there. We’ve done every other taboo subject, but no one talks about this. Now, we are.”

“Three Billboards” joined other titles at the festival such as “In the Fade,” a German film by Faith Akin about a woman taking matters in her own hands to get justice for the murders of her husband and son, and “I, Tonya,” a revisiting of the Tonya Harding story from the subject’s point of view. “In the Fade” won the best foreign film award at the Golden Globes and “I, Tonya” garnered Oscar nominations for Margot Robbie, who plays Ms. Harding, and Allison Janney, who plays LaVona Golden, Ms. Harding’s caustic mother. Ms. Janney has snatched up the best supporting actress award from almost every nominating organization this year and is a favorite on Sunday.

“I, Tonya” is a very dark comedy about people struggling to lift themselves out of their circumstances, but who are always getting in the way of themselves in subversive ways. Ms. Harding suffered emotional and physical abuse by her mother and then her husband. For years, it has been assumed that she was behind a 1994 attack that injured Nancy Kerrigan, a teammate and rival. Ms. Harding was ultimately banned from competitive figure skating for life for her alleged involvement. “She said I didn’t do it, and we didn’t listen,” Ms. Chaisson said. “She had a terrible background and a horrible husband and we blamed her. The film was a wake-up call.”

She noted other films at the festival, including “The Square,” in which a journalist played by Elizabeth Moss confronts a man with whom she has had a strange interlude and who would rather avoid her. “She was saying, ‘We had a date. It was weird. Why can’t you talk to me about this?’ ” It was an awkward but real moment not typically seen in movies. "The Square" is nominated for a best foreign film Oscar.

Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” which is now streaming on Netflix, was critically acclaimed, but may have been shut out from awards consideration after Dustin Hoffman was accused of prior sexual harassment. 

In a subplot of the film, a reticent woman tells her brothers that when she was a teen, their father’s best friend exposed and touched himself while she was in a bathing suit in an outdoor shower. Her brothers engage in some belated revenge, much to her chagrin, resulting in a resonant exchange between the siblings. The sister corrects her brother when he says the man molested her. He replies “but let’s not minimize this, Jean. What he did was shitty and damaging.”

In terms of a more direct demonstration of the themes of #MeToo and Time’s Up, Ms. Chaisson said it may take some time for films to catch up. “The crop of movies that are out are not necessarily representing it yet,” she said. The New York Times noted that women were ascendant at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but that festival’s director said in the same article that “It usually takes about two years for topics to permeate.”

Ms. Chaisson had just returned from Sundance, where HIFF goes primarily to scout documentaries for its SummerDocs program. She said it had always provided a platform for films by and about women and that women continued to make their mark in independent film. That said, she does see more general interest in stories about women and renewed and increased pressure on studios to give women parity in pay and in positions such as director and cinematographer. 

She said it is time that their contributions and women-centered stories get the same attention and support of Hollywood. “There must be change. Everything that has happened this year demands it,” she said. “Any studio that remains tone deaf will deal with quite a force.”

Alfred and David Maysles made Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale, affectionately known as Big and Little Edie, famous, but they weren’t the first to film at Grey Gardens, the mother and daughter’s ramshackle Georgica estate. In the summer of 1972, three years before the release of the brothers’ now-famous “Grey Gardens” documentary about the reclusive, captivating eccentrics, the Maysles brothers were hired as crew for a film project initiated by the photographer Peter Beard and the Beales’ niece and cousin Lee Radziwill. After a month of shooting, mainly with Mr. Beard behind the camera, the project was shelved, with the footage stored and lost track of for 45 years. 

It resurfaced and was subsequently returned to Mr. Beard when Alfred Maysles was going through some of his own reels from the period. A producer, Joslyn Barnes, met the photographer through a mutual friend and asked the Swedish director Goran Hugo Olsson to direct a cut of this newly found work, incorporating some outside footage depicting the lives of Mr. Beard and Ms. Radziwill at that time. The result is “That Summer,” which presents about a little over an hour of wonderful footage from Mr. Beard’s lost reels, showing the two Edies in their dilapidated mansion, along with a bevy of cats, crew, town officials, and Ms. Radziwill overseeing the action, just before and as workmen were brought in to renovate. 

Mr. Olsson bookended this with interviews with Mr. Beard, at work in his Montauk studio in 2016 sorting through wildlife and celebrity photos he had taken around the same time that he and Ms. Radziwill embarked on the project about her aunt and cousin. Throughout the film, the two also provide narration about the Beales, each other, and a Hamptons gone by. The documentary has been making the international festival rounds, and was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival last week. 

Mr. Olsson also included some footage of and by Andy Warhol, outside a house in Montauk he allegedly never slept in, which has little to do with the Beales but does flesh out Mr. Beard’s glittering social life — “Everybody was there, believe me,” he narrates — during the summer he and Ms. Radziwill decided to film the denizens of Grey Gardens.

Notable are the documentary’s separate but complementary nostalgia trips: As they did in the Maysles film, the Edies reminisce, lovingly and often, about past suitors, lost family members, and their respective youths. For Mr. Beard, the documentary provides a vehicle to express a certain despondency regarding the changing nature of East Hampton Town. Should “That Summer” ever play on the South Fork, audiences here might easily commiserate. “Montauk was full of great people, mostly fishermen,” he says, as he sorts through 40-something-year-old photos, “but now it’s mostly tourists.” (Viewers might identify less when he waxes nostalgic for travel via the Queen Mary, noting that “this business of airplanes is very, very disappointing.”) 

The years gone by have not dimmed Mr. Beard’s affection for the Beales, nor the anger he feels on their behalf for the treatment they received at the hands of the town. Not long before his cameras showed up, local officials had sent in the fire department to hose down the inside of Grey Gardens, traumatizing the women, an issue much discussed in these vintage reels. Frustration with local bureaucracy as a driver of negative change is a recurrent theme. “The Town of East Hampton are [sic] horrible, horrible people,” he says. “It’s amazing how people love to ruin things.”

The nostalgic nature of “That Summer” seemed to resonate with members of the mostly 20 and 30-something pan-European audience at the Berlin screening. Alice Talya, a Berlin native, said she found that “it was a bit less sad and depressing than ‘Grey Gardens.’ ” An English friend of hers in the next seat, Euan McLachlan, added that, “It just seemed a nicer portrait of them, somehow. They’re very interesting people to watch.” Both were already familiar with the Beales — “We actually re-watched ‘Grey Gardens’ yesterday, in preparation,” Ms. Talya said. 

It may be surprising that this chapter of hometown lore is so well known to foreign audiences, but clearly the Beales’ reach goes far beyond these shores. Besides their own abundant eccentric charm (which is just as on display in “That Summer” as it is in “Grey Gardens”), the two were also relatives of one of America’s most famous families — and it is Ms. Radziwill’s involvement with the documentary that is by far the most captivating part of the film. 

The Maysles brothers showed the Beales, and pretty much only the Beales, after their house had been somewhat renovated, a project funded by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s husband, Aristotle. The Beales were her aunt and cousin. (Mr. Onassis’s involvement is occasionally referenced by the characters in “That Summer,” but he never appears on camera.) Here we see Ms. Onassis’s sister, Ms. Radziwill, as the project manager, as gentle and elegant during in-house raccoon observations and meetings with contractors as she is chatting with her aunt and cousin (for whom each expresses great affection when she is off camera). Her calm, lovely presence, in addition to the Beales’ extreme-bohemian lives, might further already enthusiastic interest in all the various media produced thus far about the women. 

“My girlfriend told me about the film,” said Gosia Jargiello, a Polish resident of Berlin who attended the screening with her American partner. “She was very excited, but I’d never heard about the movie before. I liked it — and now I want to see the original one.” The footage incorporated into “That Summer” shows the women surrounded by people who care deeply about them (as well as some pesky local government inspectors), but it directly gave rise to “Grey Gardens,” in which the Beales seem very much alone. In the future, perhaps the two should be viewed as companion pieces, documenting nearly concurrent but different sides of the lives of two of East Hampton’s most intriguing women.

Susannah Edelbaum is a writer and former intern at The Star who lives in Berlin.

Haweeli at St. Luke’s

“Crossing to Water: A Lenten Journey,” a show of 20 works by Steve Haweeli, will open at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Church in East Hampton Village with a reception and brief talk by the artist on Saturday evening from 5 to 8. It will remain on view through March 9.

Of the 20 paintings, 10 feature representations of crosses and 10 were inspired by the waters of the East End. “If baptism is a purification — a regeneration — then I am baptized every time I put a mark on a canvas,” Mr. Haweeli has said. 

Half the proceeds from sales will be donated to the church’s Outreach Committee.

Collaborative Art

The Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane will host the Radiance Project, a collaborative art-making activity led by its artist-in-residence, Andrea Cote, that will take shape over the next three months. The process will involve open-studio hours and workshops for both adults and families, and will result in what the center has described as “a visionary tapestry.”

Ms. Cote said that the tapestry would not be revealed until the summer. “There will be lots of exposing in the sun and sewing still to do,” she said. “A dance portion won’t come until after that. It’s a very organic and process-oriented project.”

Information about open-studio hours (which begin Friday, March 2, from 2 to 5 p.m.) and workshops (which are scheduled for March and April) can be found on the center’s website.

O’Neill at White Room

“Kat Walk,” a solo exhibition of work by Kat O’Neill, will be on view at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton from Saturday through March 11. A reception will take place March 3 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The show will feature abstract, conceptual, and street art presented in photographs and mixed-media compositions. According to the gallery, “Tombstones are brought to life, graffiti lives beyond the ephemeral,” and pieces from the desk of a recently deceased Rikers Island prison psychiatrist will be on view.

New Pop-Up 

Iron Gate East, which will stage art exhibitions at various locations on the East End, will present its first, “Ghosts of the Inanimate,” at Southampton Social Club from Saturday through March 25. A reception for the artists, Hedwig Brouckaert, Jourdain Jongwon Lee, and Caleb Freese, will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Iron Gate East — which is described in publicity materials as “a pop-up gallery series, art forum, and marketplace” — is the creation of Kelcey Edwards, a gallerist and filmmaker who began her career in East Austin, Tex., and is now a full-time resident of Quogue. The show will be open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment by calling 512-773-5994.

More Gems at Grenning

Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will help celebrate that village’s HarborFrost festival with a performance by the popular East End bossa nova group Ludmilla and Marcello on Saturday afternoon at 3. The performance will be followed at 4 by the opening reception for “Gems: A Revival,” a show of paintings by gallery artists including Marc Dalessio, Ben Fenske, Nelson H. White, Maryann Lucas, and Ramiro, among others. The exhibition will continue through March 11.

At Mark Borghi in New York

Mark Borghi Fine Art will open “InstaSelect” at its location on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a reception today from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will continue through March 30.

The 25 participating sculptors, painters, photographers, and installation artists were chosen from submissions received by the gallery after it placed an open call on its Instagram account. 

The artists represented are from as far afield as Berlin, Beirut, Stockholm, and Vancouver, Canada. Miles Jaffe, Paul Pavia, and Terry Elkins represent the East End.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman

Stephanie Brody-Lederman’s mixed-media artwork “Mothers — Thorny Subjects” and her editioned calendars from 2007 to 2016 have been donated from the Werner H. Kramarsky Collection to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University by Mr. Kramarsky. 

In addition, one of Ms. Brody-Lederman’s paintings, “The Flaws That You and I Share,” is featured on the cover of the current issue of Interim, a literary journal.

Ellen Frank Lecture

Ellen Frank, the East Hampton artist, writer, and founding director of the Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation, will deliver the inaugural 2018 lecture of the Center for Arts Programming at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts today at 6 p.m. at the college in Old Lyme, Conn.

The seemingly endless parade of movie nominations and awards began its slog toward the Academy Awards in early October. Now that the end is in sight, with Oscar night set for March 4, the Hamptons International Film Festival is focusing a welcome lens on two of the less conspicuous categories, the Academy Award nominees for best animated short and best live action short, with a day of screenings at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday.

According to Megan Costello, a HIFF programmer and program coordinator, “At our festival we’ve seen audiences growing year after year for short films, and we had several short programs on rush at the last festival. The fact that it’s cheaper and easier to make short films allows for more creativity and diversity in storytelling and storytellers, and I think audiences are really craving that.”

The program of animated shorts, which will be shown at noon and 5 p.m., includes “Dear Basketball,” “Negative Space,” “Lou,” “Revolting Rhymes,” and “Garden Party.” Three films not nominated will round out the program: “Lost Property Office,” “Weeds,” and “Achoo.”

The live action shorts include “DeKalb Elementary,” “The Silent Child,” “My Nephew Emmett,” “The Eleven O’Clock,” and “Watu Wote/All of Us” and will be presented at 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $15 for any individual screening, $25 for a double feature.

One of the live action shorts, “DeKalb Elementary,” which was inspired by a 911 call placed during a school shooting in Atlanta, was named best narrative short film at the 2017 Hamptons International Film Festival.

“We don’t program for the Oscars,” said Ms. Costello, “but we’re thrilled ‘DeKalb Elementary’ has been nominated by the academy. I think the Hamptons audience is just a bit more in tune with really strong short-form filmmaking. It’s rare for short films to receive theatrical distribution, and there’s a real benefit to seeing them up on the big screen, so we’re always thrilled to bring that to our audiences.”

In another sign that audiences hunger for short films, the United Artists East Hampton Cinema 6 presented programs of the live action and animated nominees every day last week. Leading up to Oscar night, the East Hampton theater will show all nine nominees for best picture on a rotating basis from tomorrow through March 4. The schedule and tickets are available at fandango.com.

Hitchcock Classic

The film festival’s Winter Classic screening of “Strangers on a Train,” Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith, will take place on Saturday at 7 p.m. at Guild Hall. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the actor Alec Baldwin, who is the festival’s co-chairman, and David Nugent, its artistic director. Tickets are $25, $23 for Guild Hall and HIFF members.

To kick off Sag Harbor’s HarborFrost weekend, Bay Street Theater will present a new All Star Standup Comedy program tomorrow evening at 8. The lineup will include PJ Landers (“House of Cards,” “The Way It Went Down”), Joseph Vecsey (Optimum’s “The Unmovers,” Adam Sandler’s “Sandy Wexler”), Rosebud Baker (“Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys,” Sirius XM’s “Raw Dog Comedy Show”), and Tanael Joachim (“Gotham Comedy Live,” “Good Day New York”). Tickets are $30, $40 the day of the show.

Bay Street has also announced that it will hold open casting calls for its 2018 summer productions on Monday and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 6 p.m. both days. The call is open to male and female Equity and non-Equity actors from the East End area.

The Equity Principal audition will be run by Will Pomerantz, Bay Street’s artistic associate, and John Sullivan, the theater’s associate producer. Actors have been asked to prepare a contemporary monologue no longer than two minutes. Those who wish to demonstrate singing skills can prepare a few bars of music. More information is available at baystreet.org/about/actors-and-playwrights.

Readings of Eve Ensler’s Obie Award-winning play “The Vagina Monologues” will take place at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m. The presentation is a celebration of the play’s 20th anniversary and the founding of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

Directed by Jenna Mate and produced by Valerie diLorenzo and Amy Kirwin, the production’s cast includes Elaine Bernstein, Kathleen Carthy, Loretta Davis, Ms. diLorenzo, Carolann DiPirro, Leslie Duroseau, Rebecca Edana, Bridget Fleming, Tina Jones, Ms. Kirwin, Lola Lama, Amayrani Martinez, Kate Mueth, Cindy Pease Roe, Kimberly Quinn Johnson, and Susan Stout.

A panel discussion moderated by Ms. Davis, the director of the Retreat, will follow the 2 p.m. show, and a reception and question-and-answer session with the cast will follow the 7 p.m. performance. Tickets are $15, $12 for senior citizens, and $10 for students. Net proceeds will benefit the Retreat, which provides shelter, safety, and support for victims of domestic abuse and works to break the cycle of family violence.

Guild Hall is tripling down on its commitment to the work of East End artists this weekend with three new exhibitions: solo shows of work by Alice Hope and Hiroyuki Hamada, both of whom live and work in East Hampton, and an exhibition of artwork selected from the museum’s collection by Bryan Hunt, an artist who has a house and a studio in Wainscott.

Ms. Hope will create a site-specific installation. “She is going to bring all the materials,” said Christina Strassfield, the museum’s director and chief curator, who is organizing the Hope and Hamada exhibitions, “and deploy them in whatever way she wants. You’re going to be able to walk through some of the pieces, and others will hang from the walls and ceiling.”

Ms. Hope’s preferred materials include tabs from soda and beer cans, perforated aluminum, iron filings, ball chain, magnets, and inner springs, which she transforms with scale, pattern, and repetition. 

“I think her work really bridges the high-low, because the materials she uses have an industrial quality, but the environments she creates are exciting and often shimmery,” Ms. Strassfield said.

The configurations of certain pieces belie their materials. What appears from a distance to be a coil of rope, for example, is actually a spiral construction of can tabs and tubing. A wall-mounted chrome trash can is festooned with tabs and ball chain that flicker and sway as people move through the gallery.

Mr. Hamada will fill his gallery with a massive sculpture of pigmented resin and a selection of large prints. Built up from small, individual panels, the sculpture suggests a kind of menacing machine, something out of a dystopian science-fiction vision. His past sculptural output has combined biomorphic shapes with materials ranging from plaster, painted resin, tar, and wood to wax, among others.

The prints, which depict solid, vaguely organic shapes that echo his three-dimensional objects, were produced by Piezography, a black-and-white printing process in which seven channels of a large-format printer are loaded with seven shades of carbon pigment black ink. “When you look at them, you get this feeling of a solid, solid black shading into sfumato,” Ms. Strassfield said, referring to a fine shading technique used by Leonardo da Vinci.

“The Artist Curated Collection: Toward Abstraction” is the first of an ongoing series in which artists will draw on their unique perspectives to organize shows from the museum’s holdings. “I’m excited about Bryan’s show because I have worked with him before, and he’s a wonderful artist,” Ms. Strassfield said. Mr. Hunt had a solo exhibition at Guild Hall in 2011.

“Toward Abstraction” consists of paintings and works on paper that illuminate the various paths artists have taken from representation to abstraction. Among the artists included are Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Richmond Burton, and Eric Fischl. 

“There are legends, and there are discoveries,” said Mr. Hunt. This was his first turn as a curator, and he worked closely with Jess Frost, he said, the museum’s associate curator of the permanent collection and registrar.

“I was looking at works for what they were, not for who made them. The artworks had a point of departure, where realism breaks into an open-ended, interpretive kind of thing. They all have a foot in some sort of realism, but from that point on they go out into abstraction.”

Among the surprises he noted were an early Andy Warhol “that’s a very light, figurative drawing — you wouldn’t even know that it’s a Warhol. And some early Lichtenstein drawings that made you say, ‘Wow, Roy did that?’ ”

The exhibitions will open on Saturday and remain on view through March 25. A private reception for members will take place on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m.

The Southampton Arts Center has announced a significant upgrade to its theater, including a new screen, surround sound system, state-of-the-art projector, and new seating, as well as a commitment to presenting critically acclaimed, independent films every Friday evening throughout the year. 

The center’s 2018 film programs will begin tomorrow evening at 6 with a free screening of “Growing Farmers,” Michael Halsband and Hilary Leff’s 17-minute documentary about the challenges and opportunities facing farmers on eastern Long Island. A panel discussion with Mr. Halsband, Dan Heston of the Peconic Land Trust, and Fred Lee, Greg Kessler, and Jennifer Halsey-Dupree, who are farmers, will follow the film. Meghan Harlow, editor of Edible East End, will moderate.

Future screenings will include “Dina,” a prizewinning documentary about the relationship between a man and woman on the autism spectrum (Friday, Feb. 23), “The Divine Order,” a comedy-drama from Switzerland about a fight for women’s suffrage in a small town in 1971 (March 2), and “Step,” a 2017 documentary about a girls high school dance team in Baltimore (March 9). Tickets to most programs are $10.

The center plans to continue its partnerships with the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, and the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center.

Staring into the front picture window or tuning into the live feed on the website of Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, the current downstairs exhibition, “Off Season,” often looks like a tableau, static and formal, multiple mannequins posed just so to make an overall balanced composition.

Suddenly, one of the lifeless forms moves. It’s eerie and unnerving. Some people have even jumped, according to David Kennedy Cutler, the artist who has created this installation and is one of the dummies who actually moves throughout it.

He shares the space with four inert mannequins all dressed the same, with faces and hair that are generalized versions of the artist himself. When working as part of the installation, something he typically does over long weekends as he balances a job teaching at New York University, he dresses the same and dons a mask and wig that match the faces and hair he has given his clones. They all look “very close to my persona, but distilled in a way,” he said in the gallery recently.

So far, his winter residency has consisted of building a hermetic cube in the center of the gallery that surrounds a huge wide-format printer and a sleeping crate underneath it. He has since set about ripping apart much of the drywall around the cube to create “doors and windows,” freeing his dummies to move about the space and breathe life into their story. 

There’s myth, science fiction, Freud, and even a touch of Marx in this wide-ranging project that addresses humanity, survival, and the act of creation. Dressed like his dummies, he has given himself only one hole in the mask by one of his eyes, which makes breathing and seeing more difficult. The gloves he wears, made of fabric designed to look like mechanical hands, constrain him so that he is less dexterous, sometimes clumsy.

At the same time, he has assigned himself many tasks: making artworks related to survival (clothing, food, companionship), tending to the dummies and the damage they sustain over time, and the tears and rips to his own costume. These and other chores might seem basic, but they take on a Herculean character when he is so voluntarily compromised in his senses.

The evidence of his productivity is all around: his shelter, the sleeping crate he built for himself and the Plexiglas and wood versions for his dummies, the board he fashioned to walk with them about the gallery, his “fresco” shirts and other artworks he has in progress with potatoes and shoes as subject matter, the moving blanket painted and decorated with images of Dentyne Ice packages.

A camera monitors his activities for the live stream, which is on YouTube and the gallery’s home page. When he views himself in the four-hour playback loop, his labors “seem very programmatic. There’s no joy in it.” With the mask limiting his ability to express himself, “you can’t perceive how I’m feeling or emoting, but there is a sense that what I’m doing is not easy.”

Over the years, Mr. Cutler has worked as an art installer with many private and public clients on the South Fork, and has visited often. In this job, “you’re theoretically a working-class person, but you’re allowed access to this really rarified, privileged world of wealth. You’re an artist, but not supposed to commune with the object you’re installing. You have to wear gloves and clean socks, and smell okay. There is a barrier between you and the world in these scenarios,” he said. “Part of that is a performance. . . . I think about this a lot: What is the expectation of your role in society? Those things are pretty operative in the work.”

His work in the gallery touches on installation, performance, and formalism. Yet the dummies, which he has been using in work since 2014, were an outgrowth of his initial training and work as a sculptor. “The only job of a sculptor is to make something stand up. Here, the dummies never really can.”

He is also fascinated by the way digital culture has entered and changed almost everything in our lives, particularly how it affects our identity. He describes it as a “dual conundrum between social media and capitalism that you are expected to magnify your natural abilities or identity disproportionally . . . a constant need to project an idealized image of yourself.” Multiplicity is also part of this, “where you are not just defined by one head shot or an author photo on the back of a book, but a perpetual maintenance of identity, a projection of the self out into the world. . . . Experience is only valid via the document or image of it taking place.”

An outgrowth of that phenomenon is the manipulation of such images or documents so that no one can be sure what is real or manufactured. “I like to toy with that feeling of the uncanny . . . that rupture in perception, that thing that makes the commonplace strange,” he said.

Filming all of the residency on a digital camera, he may produce a post-exhibition film. After he leaves the gallery, he said he might take field trips with his posse to his clients’ houses, setting up more travails, maybe walking five across up a flight of stairs, or sitting down with them to watch television. For now, they can all still be seen in the Newtown Lane gallery, viewed through the picture window, or watched on live stream at halseymckay.com through March 24

Laurie Anderson, the musician and visual and performance artist who has defied convention across a more than four-decade career, has made language and storytelling a centerpiece of her varied explorations. In a world in which the president of the United States lies more than 2,000 times per year while denouncing the news media as fake, and a foreign adversary simultaneously seeds social media with misinformation, she and other artists have ample material to consider.

With “All the Things I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code,” Ms. Anderson, who has a house in Springs, offers a career retrospective showcasing her expansive and varied oeuvre. The book features voluminous essays and excerpts thereof, photographs depicting performances given in multiple contexts across her career, and illustrations, among them a series chronicling Lolabelle, her rat terrier who died in 2011, in the bardo, the transitional state of existence between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. The latter was explored in her 2015 film “Heart of a Dog,” a meditation on love, loss, and death from a Buddhist perspective.

On Saturday at 2 p.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton, Ms. Anderson will talk about “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” with Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s museum director and chief curator. A reception and book signing will follow. The talk is free, but reservations have been requested by visiting guildhall.org.

In her music, which may synthesize avant-garde, classical, pop, and more — “Landfall,” a collaboration with the genre-defying Kronos Quartet will be released tomorrow — Ms. Anderson regularly combines music and spoken-word meditations, her voice often electronically altered or distorted. A violinist, her instrument is also subject to manipulation, the result sometimes an entirely new or otherworldly sound. What is real, she seems to ask, in words, sounds, and images.

With her late husband, the musician Lou Reed, Ms. Anderson lived along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan. Two days after Superstorm Sandy “turned our street into a dark, silky river,” she writes in “All the Things I Lost in the Flood,” she went to the basement to check on the materials and equipment stored there. “Nothing was left,” she writes. “The seawater had shredded and pulped everything. Even the electronic equipment was now a lumpy gray sludge. At first I was devastated. The next day I realized I would never have to clean the basement again.”

The day after that, she looked at a binder containing an inventory of all that had been lost. “I realized that since they were no longer objects, they had an entirely different meaning, and that having these long lists was just as good as having the real things. Maybe even better.”

Language, loss, stories, impermanence, and, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the rise of surveillance and data mining are woven throughout her work. In “Happiness,” an essay from 2001 excerpted in “All The Things I Lost in the Flood,” she writes that “every morning was like waking up in a parallel universe where it was suddenly possible that buildings and people could turn into dust before your eyes. . . . And when we look again we see the dreamlike impermanence of the world. The only words that make any sense to me now are the words of the Dalai Lama who said, ‘Your worst enemies are your best friends because they teach you things.’ ”

Ms. Anderson is “in hyper-drive now,” she said last Thursday, “maybe because of some reaction to the Trump era. I’m kind of thinking, ‘What else can we do but work, make things, try to make some beautiful things?’ ”

“I guess it was the last election,” she said, “that sent me over into the realm of what are stories, and what it’s like to live in a world of stories, especially when people are beginning to talk about how things end.” Such apocalyptic talk, she said, is manifested in discussions of catastrophic climate change, this month’s wild gyrations in the stock market and the uncertainty they represent, and the Doomsday Clock, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, citing an “obvious and imminent” existential threat of nuclear war, recently set closer to midnight. 

“People are seeing things in a much darker way,” she said. “Not everything has this very neat structure. Also, this was a story that a lot of people did not expect. When expectations are suddenly broken, I think a lot of people feel quite lost, it’s a ‘story emergency.’ ”

She started working on the book, she said, “with this idea of what happens when the world kind of disappears, and records are an example: Records disappeared, then record stores. Books, and then book stores. It’s a world of representation. That is the jumping-off place for the talk about the book.”

“It really is fun to do yet another layer of this — doing the book about the work, and the work about the book,” she said. “I like to build on things — it’s all, in a way, one long piece. I’m already seeing how it was working, understanding better what I was trying to get at.”

Ms. Anderson was recently in Europe, where she began performing in the early 1970s, part of a wave of American artists who found, like jazz musicians before them, greater opportunities and larger, more responsive audiences there. Today’s political climate, she said, encourages projects beyond our shores. 

“I was an expat,” she said. “I got more opportunities to work in Europe than I did in the United States. . . . People were asking me constantly, ‘How can you live in a place like that?’ It was not a short answer. That’s why I wrote ‘United States,’ ” a five-record set recorded in 1983 that spanned eight hours in its live performances. “A very long piece, because it’s a complicated thing, obviously,” she said. “I feel that there’s many similar things going on now.”

And not just here: A “giant fracturing” is happening in Europe as well, she said. “This carefully constructed version of your personality, the world, and suddenly you’re not so sure. . . . It’s a very intensely interesting moment now. When you no longer have the timeworn narratives you’ve been living by, that makes it a really interesting place, and you really have to live in the present, which most people aren’t doing, particularly.”

Saturday’s discussion follows one in Boston on Feb. 7. Another happens at Town Hall in Manhattan tomorrow. “It’s fun to talk about something you don’t know so well yet,” she said. “You don’t have your rap down, exactly. Before it freezes into one thing, I’m enjoying what people think about it.”

Along with Saturday’s talk, Ms. Anderson will offer a brief presentation at a screening of “American Psycho” on Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center. “I was one of the filmmakers asked to choose a film w­­ith ‘American values’ as part of the campaign to rebuild Sag Harbor Cinema,” she said. “I can’t stand violence, but look forward to seeing this film through a socio-political filter. This may not be completely fair to the film or to the filmmaker, but nevertheless it’s one way to see movies.”

Ms. Anderson’s “Chalkroom,” a collaboration with the new-media artist Hsin-Chien Huang that she describes in “All the Things I Lost in the Flood” as a virtual-reality work in which the reader flies through an enormous structure made of words, drawings, and stories, will be on view at Guild Hall from June 2 to July 22. She plans a reading of her book in July, which she hinted would experiment with putting it into a musical context. 

“I left a lot out,” she said. “I wanted to focus on how words are affecting imagery. I didn’t really talk about music, and in many ways that’s my thing, being a musician.”