In Dan Devening’s paintings, he summons forth bits and pieces of thespian flotsam—yards of drapery never to be drawn back, ornate chandeliers forever darkened, segments of backdrops randomly leaning against one another—and juxtaposes them with images of actors (sometimes drawn from the commedia dell’arte), creating melancholy evocations animated by a palpable sense of loss. Presented on multiple panels frequently stacked atop one another and presented on shelves in seemingly random arrangements, Devening’s images have an eerie and ghostlike quality, a Felliniesque air that undercuts the initial

In Bibiana Suárez’s recent show, entitled “In Search of an Island,” the geographic silhouette of Puerto Rico dominated six of the eight large pastel drawings exhibited. Here, the island of her birth is malleable and chameleonlike, mirroring her conflicting feelings about her homeland. It appears as a black hole absorbing life and light, as a dangerous-looking spiny sea creature, as a bit of tropic flotsam sailing by in a placid sea, or even as a chamber of the human heart, veined and throbbing with life. Animating these sequences is the ambiguous and tortured geopolitical status of Puerto Rico