Jeanne Dunning’s glossy Cibachrome prints, either laminated or mounted on Plexiglas (all works 1990), are as seductive as just-licked lips. Slick facades are very much in keeping with the slippery agenda of this Chicago-based artist. Dunning manipulates viewer assumptions, using them as a springboard from which to launch investigations into a complex of interrelated questions and themes, including: the nature of portraiture; the mechanisms of photographic imagining; the portrayal of gender; the sexual allure of hair and hairiness; the relative determination of beauty, deformity; and what’s

This miniretrospective of Bruce Conner’s assemblages, paintings, drawings, and “engraving collages” traces a career that began brilliantly but has subsequently trailed off on a foot-dragging note. Throughout the ’60s, Conner turned the scattered remains of broken found objects into some of the most compelling assemblages since Joseph Cornell. In the process Conner exploded Cornell’s modest vignettes, producing a furious, dismembered theater of mummified despair. Wax, doll parts, silk stockings, lace, rubber hose, and assorted detritus were juxtaposed in sinister sexually charged tableaux.

Conner

Since his early association with the Los Angeles finish-fetish group in the mid ’60s, John McCracken has always been seen in terms of contradictory esthetics. On one hand, his sculptures’ reductive geometries, serial arrangements, and contingent relationship to both viewer and surrounding space have aligned him with Minimalism. On the other hand, the works’ highly reflective surfaces, their reduction of material properties to pure color, and the interplay of form and exterior light have encouraged transcendental readings, as if Minimalism’s materialism were merely a smoke screen for “spiritual”