Nancy Barton has a knack for making art that’s at once self-centered and self-deprecating—for her the personal is both political and pathetic. Although devoting weighty consideration to intensely intimate subject matter, her work always comes packaged in the most laughable melodrama. In her most recent show, “Live and Let Die,” 1992, works with names like Doctor No and Stayin Alive depict her decidedly mixed emotions toward her father. Surprisingly, Barton manages to evoke white-bread icons James Bond and John Travolta without stuffing tongue in cheek; on the contrary, this new work is as

Carl Ostendarp makes a joke of painting that, like the most biting kinds of humor, works by occupying two positions at once. His 3-D paintings (it’s impossible to suppress a smirk when calling them “reliefs”) dutifully fulfill the obligation of formalist abstraction: they’re frank about their framing edges, keenly aware of the difference between depicted and literal form, and determined to pack as much punch as possible into the diminished space of pictorial illusionism without violating the integrity of the picture plane. Evidence of their maker’s hand is inessential to their effect, as is the

Closing, ironically, the day after: Independence Day, this exhibition marked the 50th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which declared all persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast a threat to national security, and led to the incarceration of 120,313 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Deprived of liberty, livelihood, property, and dignity—virtually jailed in hastily constructed “camps” located in desolate areas of the country—two-thirds of these internees were U.S. citizens. The toll of this injustice and its historical