Nancy Pierson’s thoroughly peculiar tableaux of middle-aged women suggest, through their eccentric wordless narratives, the tangled webs of female-to-female relations.

The figures in these charcoal works on paper are positioned with an intentional stiltedness. If pushed much further, this quality could come off as conventionally allegorical; as it is, the slight stiffness contributes to the work’s overall oddness. Making use of smudged areas as well as fine cross-hatching, Pierson’s renderings contain a measure of neo-Gothic spookiness, which is quite magnetic. The women in these works look like

Tom Wudl’s tour of earthly delights takes two forms. Tiny paintings (as small as four by three inches) of isolated objects—a goblet, a yellow fish, a bird, a hand holding a bullet paradoxicallyfeel as expansive as the gigantic The Rapture of Dionysus (all works 1991), a painting that features an explosion of information—a burst of flora, a clock, a deck shoe, a violin, and the Challenger spaceship exploding in a galaxy studded with stars and planets. Small paintings have a tendency to be awkwardly constricted, but Wudl’s diminutive works do not fall prey to rigidity and stiffness; they