The artist Patrick Quarm considers himself a social archaeologist. Since moving from Ghana to Texas in 2015 for his master’s degree, he has learned to navigate various cultural spaces, and his eye for fitting into — or sticking out of — his surroundings informs his latest show at the Albertz Benda gallery in New York. The exhibit, titled “Phantoms in Familiar Terrains,” is a collection of mixed-media, highly fragmented portraits. Some, like his “Specimen” works (2024), show their subjects unraveling, threads emerging from painted canvas that’s framed within wooden vitrines. Other pieces obscure aspects of what’s shown: in “Echoes of Then and Now” (2024), the silhouettes of figures are depicted only as colorful gradients, with a few key features, like faces or hands, rendered on smaller canvases jutting out of the main painting. Quarm references his home country through his materials, using African wax fabrics sourced from local Ghanaian markets to dress his characters and placing them in inviting tropical hangouts. The artist splits his time between his hometown, Takoradi, and New Haven, Conn., and draws on the friends and family that he’s photographed between the two countries for his paintings. “I’m constantly looking for individuals living within that cultural third space, or that have a hybrid identity going on within them,” Quarm says.