Works by New York/Alaska-based Sienna Shields, and C. Finley of New York and Rome, are rich with texture and color. Chock-full of compiled items, Shields’s collage paintings and Finley’s mixed media mandala are comprised of layered materials that cohere together to produce whole works. These artworks are neither overwhelming nor disorganized—rather they are visually diverse,…

We wouldn’t expect a straight take on the presumed comfort of “home and hearth” from Marlene McCarty. Her monumental diptych, Hearth 2 (China Camp 2009, China Camp 1976) (2010) is no exception. The two drawings (80” x 117” and 80” x 115”) describe the scene of a crime, in stereo. Both show the same low-angle…

Untitled (2013) is a poised illusion: a Beat arrangement in the romantic tradition. Structured according to the artist’s perspective where subjectivity is the narrative center, the physical actualization of its floating bronze beams is freed from reason. Or perhaps it is more like Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne because Shapiro knows that to suspend a moment…

Anyone who has ever been punched squarely in the nose can appreciate those old Tom & Jerry cartoons’ expert rendering of the experience: When struck, Tom’s face would recoil so far that it would disappear into his head. That’s not what it looks like to be punched in the face, but it’s what it feels…

Tamara Gonzales is like a shaman, a female spiritual leader in North Brooklyn. With the most economic means, her ecstatic paintings effuse with kaleidoscopic patterns of color and light. She employs antique lace as a template through which she creates polychromatic washes of spray paint. Lace isn’t girly in Gonzales’s images. Multiple patterns and styles…

Margrit Lewczuk’s bright paintings titled Connie’s Drum and Green & Purple were installed facing her husband Bill Jensen’s intense diptych Passions According to Andrei (Rublev/Tarkovsky). The adjoining wall was hung with a cluster of eleven of Lewczuk’s smaller paintings, drawings and collages interspersed with eight of Jensen’s brush drawings in black ink. Where Jensen’s work…

Elves? Sprites? Muscular fairies? Outcast female deities from a far off land? Naked and vulnerable with breasts exposed, they tumble through space like whirligigs set loose on a stormy day. One lies on the ground, back arched, beckoning to the various limbs that are sticking out of green bushes or maybe those are mutant fruits…

Rona Pondick’s world has long been one of astounding perfection crossed with disturbing, yet inviting, mutation. Phantasms of chimerical hybrids, her sculptures, have a presence and personality that make me want to sit on the floor and talk to them, or stroke their gleaming curves and limbs, or twisted plaintive heads as I pass by….

That Bob Witz’s 2011 piece, called Apollon-Musagète (or “Apollo, conducteur of the Muses”), is a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s 1928 ballet is made clear by the fact that the two pieces share a name. Based on an episode from Greek mythology in which three muses—Terpsichore (the muse of dance), Calliope (poetry), and Polyhymnia (mime)—visit Apollo,…