Without falling into cliché and seemingly without guile, Rick Stich makes Impressionist-inspired paintings—primarily still lifes and landscapes—that are remarkably fresh. Stich prevents the work from becoming mere imitation by using a highly personalized brushstroke and, on occasion, by creating a kind of penetrating perspectival depth. A small tempera-on-silk entitled Reflection: Pond, 1986, seems at first like a too-direct quote from Monet but, on closer examination, the work conveys a welcome tension between pure surface and illusion.

Stich’s paintings tend to be small and intimate, and their

The work of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler is concerned with collapsing the dialectic between public and private, inside and outside, through a strategy of semiotic reconstruction. By remapping and relabeling the established cultural codes of institutions such as the family, home, and museum, Ericson and Ziegler attempt to disclose the concealed alienation and ideological base of all artificially predetermined systems, including their own. Their agent provocateur in this enterprise is language itself. In the process of estranging the domestically familiar within a public, often commercial context,

It’s odd to see Italo Scanga’s work, which is centered around an unabashed, almost rural emotionality, in smoggy, urbane Los Angeles. At their most successful, his sculptures, paintings, and drawings are bursting with earthy energy. Made from strange ingredients—wood, harvesting tools, fake fruit, real flowers, musical instruments, and other found objects—these pieces reveal Scanga’s love both of the man-made and the natural.

The show was divided into three major sections and a shrinelike vestibule. In the latter section, the works are titled Composite (with different subtitles) and all dated

Throughout his too-short career, Patrick Hogan’s physical limitations determined his working method. All his adult life he worked from a wheel chair. Early on, when he had some use of his hands, he produced paintings on raw felt and kapok. He would brand canvases with a glob or two of paint, gestures that took the form of willful smears. These paintings are blunt, minimal, and somewhat surreal. The acrylic brushstrokes seem to float off the cloudlike surfaces.

Eventually Hogan devised a method of painting whereby an assistant would execute his work, yet no trace of the assistant’s touch would be