Nancy Burson has been investigating techniques for making computer-assisted photographic images for over fifteen years, participating in the development of programs that have enabled her to pursue her work with increasing sophistication, flexibility, and range.

In Burson’s recent show, viewers found themselves transfixed by the unblinking stares of ten large faces. These composite Polaroid Polacolor ER portraits, realized with the aid of the artist’s faithful computer, fuse aspects that might be thought grotesque with other features that could be considered beautiful.

The photographs in this

In Lari Pittman’s Victorian domestic utopias, the most terrifying nightmares and the ripest euphorias take tea together within the cozy parameters of the rectangle. The vocabulary is gaudy and hallucinogenic—an ornamental chaos maxed out with information, in which the artist proposes an anxious unity between things humiliating and pleasurable.

In this new body of work—a virtual masquerade ball—Pittman represents himself as a highly socialized, carnivorous female owl, with large saggy breasts and humongous vaginas. In Transubstantial and Needy, 1991, an oversized owl wearing a bejeweled crown that

With their chain-sawed, charred surfaces and serial arrangements in blocklike masses, Shigeo Toya’s wood sculptures suggest a Japanese variation on Western Minimalism; it is as if works by Carl Andre and Donald Judd were suddenly imbued with a Zen-like “primal spirit.” However, instead of constructing sculpture from the inside out, so that material mass and volume are emptied out in favor of a skeletal space-as-mass, Toya’s guiding paradigm is archaeological. He excavates from the outside in, interpenetrating the material so that, by analogy, he inserts himself into its center. Toya himself