“The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World”

This intriguing five-artist show feels like a séance, with its cosmic geometric imagery, apparition-like figurative sculptures, and magickal overtones. Actually, it’s a six-artist show if you count Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Her seventeenth-century text—considered to be the first work of science fiction—provides the exhibition’s title and has been photocopied for visitors. The protofeminist, antique futurism of Cavendish’s strange story prefigures the show’s cyborgian themes and accentuates its time warp-y mise-en-scène.

Betty Tompkins’s small psychedelic Pop colored-pencil drawings from 1970–71 feature disembodied mouths, targets, a garter, and one sketchy cock. Tompkins is best known for her brilliant, closely cropped photorealist depictions of heterosexual penetration, so these weird drawings, made at the onset of her “fuck painting” practice, are cool surprises. Other highlights are the ethereal, architectural abstractions of Magalie Comeau’s oil paintings; Tillman Kaiser’s wall-mounted sculpture Fever, 2012, which has a vulval Dinner Party vibe with its central diamond-shaped orifice and cut-crystal patterning; and Cajsa von Zeipel’s Blind Man’s Bluff, 2014, a towering white statue of nearly nude, androgynous teen waifs where a girl in a T-shirt and a thong rides piggyback on another girl, both shod in super-high platform boots.

There’s another thong—or demi thong?—on display in Anna Uddenberg’s life-size sculpture Jealous Jasmine, 2014. It’s the show’s scariest piece. In it, a female robo-mannequin in a Mad Max–style warrior/stripper outfit (plus Uggs and a warm jacket) is contorted, trying to climb head first into a stroller. Has she eaten the baby? Peer in and find out.