Laura Howe works to take women out of the footnotes of Western history and insert them into its normally exclusionary texts. Isolating photographs of vaguely remembered female faces and deteriorating the images through excessive photocopying, Howe stacks and overlaps these indexes within steel contraptions that resemble a cross between designer office furniture and post-Minimalist sculpture.

Chronocology, 1992, the most elaborate piece in this compact but powerful exhibition of works, questions the linear narratives of Western history (“chronology”) through the interrogatory image of the specifically

Mitchell Syrop’s gargantuan installation of approximately 900 high-school-yearbook photos possessed a peculiar subtlety. The aluminum supports, which Syrop calls “extrusions,” and the gridlike stacking of rectangular images lent this work an industrial, living-on-top-of-eachother, cell-block quality. Blown up via laser printing to 8 1/2 by 11 inches, the photographs were assembled into ten separate male and female Caucasian “constellations” of 500, 300, 24, 12, etc., ranging in size from 14 by 27 feet to 24 by 35 inches.

Though these photographs reeked of institutional control—as in a roll

David Humphrey’s paintings are a vision of family members in the Freudian funhouse, a whirlpool of holes and poles, of leering toothy smirkers with painfully swollen ears. There’s an everybody’s-talking-about-me quality, a buzzy self-consciousness thing going on that jumps from painting to painting and causes the entire body of work to hum with big-time anxiety. A sort of laugh-track esthetic is operating here, in which gaps pave the way to humiliation. These paintings kick around ideas of carnality, of growing up, of composing a facial identity for the camera, of being found out—the compulsion