Susan Chrysler White’s mixed-media pieces explore both esthetic and political issues through multiple visual vocabularies. The images in the drawings at the heart of these pieces evolve through elaborate material manipulations that relate female sexual organs to botanical fragments, Italian eel traps, and circular rings. In some of the larger pieces, such as Catacomb and Codex, both 1992, the uniform size, scale, and presentation of the varied drawings (12-by-17-inch units, attached in a gridlike framework) make possible larger formal and political statements.

Codex emphasizes the verticality of