For her recent exhibition of rattan sculptures, Rita McBride turned to the sweatshops of the Philippines and had the boys there custom make her a 1990 Toyota Celica GT to scale from this unlikely material. These reeds might smell nice at first, but McBride’s endeavor becomes suspicious upon closer inspection. The artist makes the dubious claim that the workers, who also produced two eight-foot-high nuclear silos for her, were“challenged” by her project. And, even though McBride’s work does venture the point that the seductive appeal of silos as architecture conflicts with a potentially destructive

Using the contexturalization of painting as his material paradigm, Richard Jackson’s installations have consistently exploited a dialectic between the illusionistic and the literal. His theoretical springboard would appear to be Michael Fried’s well-known, late-’60s distinction between art and objecthood. According to Fried, the Minimalist (literalist) practice of creating environmental situations, in which artwork, beholder, and surrounding space create a contingent, experiential gestalt was not art. Because the active viewer became the subject of the piece, the actual artwork was necessarily

Meg Webster is known for her earthy, commandingly primal forms, yet the three works exhibited here managed to inhabit the gallery, even make it feel full, without coming off as overly imposing. The objects displayed did not seem to acknowledge each other’s presence any more than they did the viewers’; these are certainly not Webster’s warmest, most user-friendly works, though, like all her art, they embody a quiet tug-of-war between cool and warm, live and dead, the constructed and the “natural,” and the captive and the “free.”

Steel Containing Salt (all works 1990), which consists of a sheet of