Mike Kelley shares with Georges Bataille the position of “excremental philosopher,” exploring the underbelly of patriarchal culture, and focusing on what is degraded, refused, denied, repressed, and embarrassing. With deft inflections, he turns the stereotypically “good” into the ugly, and infuses the stupidly familiar with just enough horror to turn its blandness inside out, replacing the smile with what it tries to cover up.

Most of the work on exhibit here was grouped under the heading “Half a Man” and resembled what is typically defined as “women’s work.” The wall-hanging More Love Hours Than

Mitchell Kane’s new paintings are at once marginal and authoritative. Nine recent works constituted this exhibition, of which five, occupying Lockett’s rear-gallery “inner sanctum,” functioned as a kind of installation. The works gathered in the rear gallery were called “Margin Paintings”: 7-by-5-foot rectangles of aluminated rubberized canvas on stretchers, with an approximately 15-inch-wide vertical band of enamel on gesso—executed in shades of white, brown, chestnut, orange, or yellow—occupying each painting’s right-hand edge. There is a superficial resemblance here to the austere painted

This show was dominated by the artist’s near floor-to-ceiling installation of 21 small, framed paintings on one wall, paintings which seemed to chronicle the rather aimless activities of modern life. In image after image, male figures, rendered in a lavender grisaille on a pristine white ground, are shown going about their business with a determined nonchalance that, in the unrelieved aggregate, becomes a kind of despair. Some perform daily chores—sweeping, carrying boxes, combing hair, mowing, carrying bags of garbage—while others sit on toilets, take showers, pray, commit suicide, sculpt,