With his photocollages, John Stezaker engages in an art of extraction, arresting the ceaseless flow of things seen and excerpting from them individual motifs. He starts not from optical sensations but from the individual thing, disclosed in that spectral entirety, either all there or absent, that is the image. He accepts photography as a condition of universal mediation, an ambience whose simulations displace natural experience with structures of codes and captions. What interests him is the power of fascination, even of residual myth, found in images—a power that gives rise to encodings in the

The large exhibition space here is the ground floor of a warehouse that has been turned into artists’ studios. Until recently it bore the look of its light-industrial past, an uneven floor and dilapidated ceiling lending it a less than salubrious air. Caroline Russell’s Display 21, 1989, however, presented it in a new light. Walls and ceilings were coated with brilliant white emulsion, a central dividing screen was upgraded to the status of a wall (marking off the back half of the area as the main exhibiting space), and the floor had a smart new coat of gray paint. The finishing touch to this