Whiting Tennis wants to know how culture operates. In this, his second major series of work, he looks to the fickle world of fashion for clues. His surface is wood, his media are oil and woodblock print. The oils transcribe images of models’ faces and bodies from Vogue and Mademoiselle directly onto the wood; counterimages of schematic female forms and other shapes are gouged into the wood. Two pictured ideas are thus combined into one unassimilated whole. Tattooed into the smart dress of a walking woman is a torso outline, filled with gold leaf (Ritual Vessel, 1988); a bunched skeleton gravens