Given the current political and legal battles being waged over women’s bodies, not to mention recent revisionist histories that flesh out centuries of social and psychological domination, it is not surprising that issues revolving around the representation of the body should be attracting attention in the world of art as well. While studies of gender have informed feminist strategy, these analytical dissections have also supplied fragments and body parts as materials of artistic expression. Picking up the pieces and reassembling them in sexual configurations related to, but different from, the

Adam Brooks embossed the Esperanto phrase: “La Pova de Lingvo, La Nesufico de Vortoj,” (The power of language, the inadequacy of words) in bold press type on an ex-terior window of the gallery. Though the phrase was not conceived as the title of the exhibition, it nonetheless described the parameters of his inquiry. Brooks is an artist who stands in awe of language, and his multimedia art bears restless witness to the instability of words. Simultaneously intrigued and frightened by the inability of words to fully accommodate experience, as well as by our complete dependence on this inadequate

In Paul Chidester’s 12 small egg-tempera and oil paintings, collectively entitled “Corn,” red words name little-known constellations, and black ones designate obsolete varieties of corn. Between the verbal references to the rural Midwest, one glimpses the faded concrete and brick of a crumbling city infiltrated by pale green vegetation.

The circuitous arrangement of these phrases, imitating the growth patterns of vegetation, do not actually enter the virtual space of the image but trace its shapes on the surface, gently reaffirming the picture plane and thus recalling the image’s material nature.