Jod Lourie’s porcelain reliefs grow ever more bizarre, fantastic, and grotesque. Her previous efforts in this medium have addressed the confluence of a repressed Italian Catholic girlhood and emerging female sexuality. Now in her 40s, Lourie appears to have worked through most of that tortured post-adolescent conflict. At midlife she has added a forthright confrontation with death to the heady mating of religion and sex.

In all of these most basic human experiences the self is transformed. In religion, the self is abandoned to spirit; in sex, to the other; in death, to nonexistence. Lourie’s