Alison Saar’s often ironic icons—life-size wood and metal figures, paintings on scraps of tin and guitar backs, and constructions called “potions”—are like models for sacred objects with the power to hurt or cure. These charms take their places as ritual fetishes in Saar’s prototypical folk religion—an amalgam of voodoo, feminism, Catholicism, childhood superstition, and African and Cuban lore. To this brew Saar adds her humor, urban sensibility, and pursuit of the ascension of the human spirit.

Cigarette fumes, coffee steam, and spirals are three images Saar employs to evoke the struggle to

Like many of her conceptually oriented peers, Liz Larner is concerned with deconstructing the role of the art institution in its presentation of the artwork. In lesser hands, this has often led to the creation of falsely contrived dualities: specifically, an opposition between artist and establishment in which the inevitable cultural and political seepage between the two sides is either artificially negated or simply denied altogether. Consequently, the circumscribing role of the gallery or museum is simply traded in for another reifying dogma, that of confrontational theory itself. Larner’s

“Still,” the title of Cam Slocum’s recent body of work, refers to the frozen, continuous, disquieting life inside photographs of violence. This work taps into the human appetite for, and repulsion toward, representations of death. Slocum has taken such images, blown them up to 72 by 72 inches (aren’t a lot of artists reconsidering the big artwork? how else to get your attention?), and turned them into beautiful, grand paintings. The technique is derived from a late-19th-century photographic process in which large-scale negatives are developed by sunlight, then impregnated with pure pigment on

The latest of Brian Eno’s light-and-sound installations immerses viewers in an environment of radiant images and ambient sound. “Latest Flames,” 1988, is a series of seven more or less discrete video sculptures—arrangements of television monitors set within structures of translucent foamcore and programed to generate constantly shifting color spectra—and an accompanying envelope of soft, melodic synthesizer tones. Five pieces are sited along the side and rear walls of a large square gallery; two others are set within smaller adjoining alcoves. The installation is lit only by the glow from the