Elizabeth Newman’s sculptural objects fetishize memory; they reek of a kind of precious poignancy that teeters precariously on the edge of solipsism. Her art is one of poetic embalming, a dreamy but determined descent into memory and recollection. Newman characteristically retrieves an object that has a personal, spiritual, or metaphorical aura, intervenes to augment the quality that attracted her, and presents the resulting artifact in an encasement that estheticizes it, enhancing its particular aura of meaning.

Untitled (Bovine Eggs), (all works 1990), assembles a collection of oval calcified

Early in the 19th century Edward Hicks repeatedly painted William Penn amidst the becalmed beasts of the wild. Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom embodied a precious hope of the Age of Reason: that in the new Eden of America, the aims of mankind and the dictates of nature had found a harmony reflecting an innate universal order. Laurie Hogin’s recent show of 16 paintings, entitled “Whose Woods Are These,” (all works 1990) suggests that things have irrevocably changed; Hicks’ Eden never existed, or at any rate has been hopelessly befouled, and human existence and environmental disorder are inexorably