Mineko Grimmer’s two works in this exhibition made use of natural elements, such as ice, stone, water, wood, and bamboo, substances that have extraordinary esthetic and metaphorical weight in Asian art traditions. Both works were also time-based. The lesser work was Music Boxes, 1988, which consisted of a pair of wood structures shaped something like square baskets with handles across their tops. Each box enclosed a metal trough of water surmounted by an open latticework of bamboo sticks. Beneath the bamboo in one box were three taut metal wires that acted as sounding strings. In place of the

Deborah Oropallo’s paintings might be classified as a new, piquant kind of Magic Realism. They don’t resemble the old, mid-century, mooning kind; less private, more assertive, and precisely melancholic, they live up to the term better, and more literally. The gem of this show was a small painting called Lemon Vanish, 1988. In it a lemon and a black top hat (props gleaned directly from Manet’s bag of tricks) occupy the center of a compact field, fixed by burnished swaths of light ocher and deep, icey green. A pair of perforated ellipses diagrammed on the hat’s crown testifies that the lemon is