The substances of sorcery and of the body are commingled in Laura Stein’s paintings and arrangements of objects. Grainy black and white photographs of bodily products such as blood cells or facial skin, as well as images of various seeds and powders used in the casting of spells, are applied to blocks of wax and to oil-on-canvas paintings.The resulting works are spellbinding in a curiously literal way. Self Portrait (Blood Cells), 1989, consists of five wall-mounted rectangles of white wax in different sizes. Silk-screened enlargements of blood cells appear on the roughened sides of these blocks:

Each of the nine meticulous paintings in this show is of a virtually uninhabited room with a missing fourth wall. Several of these interiors are bisected by lines showing where the planes of the rooms’ walls meet. Each painting’s perspective is slightly but elegantly distorted, as though the depicted room were made of paper and had been folded along that line. The intentionally stilted look of Lasworth’s meditative interiors refers to pre-Renaissance religious painting and Christian thought. The works’ titles cite the crazed, self-styled Christian mystic Hazel Motes (who appears in Flannery

The idea of one artist assembling a body of work and titling it “Group Show” is appealing and makes sense. Who better to pair oneself with than oneself? But as Franz Kafka noted, “I have hardly anything in common with myself.” For different reasons, this also might be true of Marc Pally’s message. Group Show (all works, 1989) is also a wall piece, consisting of 58 little paintings arranged in a giant oval. Each painting, with two exceptions, contains a two- or three-word phrase (“Hemorrhoid Sufferers,” “Cluster Analysis,” “Go For It,” “Crying Out Loud,”) or a name, such as “Oliver North” or “