Not since the days of “bad painting” has someone tried as hard as Lisa Yuskavage does to make a travesty of the medium. In her saccharine portraits of prepubescent nymphets, girlish innocence and sexual awakening are given thoroughly ham-fisted treatment. Yuskavage mobilizes the entire cutie-pie repertoire—big eyes peering through thick bangs, plump cheeks, pouty lips, upturned noses—to doll-up a field of semiclad and naked bodies swollen as much by baby fat as sexual ripeness. The result is a litter of Hello Sex Kitties. Garish background color catapults each figure toward the viewer, and even

Carole Caroompas paints with a vengeance, producing enormous seminarrative canvases with a cheeky disregard for what artists—especially feminist artists—are “supposed” to be doing in the ’90s. Not a single piece of fur, not a single body part, no installation objects, nothing but acrylic paint on rectangular pieces of canvas, yet these large-format paintings are anything but conventional.

Since her emergence within the feminist art community in Los Angeles in the ’70s, Caroompas has developed an individual yet recognizably Angeleno style: with minimal brushstroke texture she renders repetitive

Visitors to Jennifer Pastor’s first solo show were treated to a three-dimensional, freezeframed explosion of cartoon energy. Pastor’s single, sprawling sculpture dominated the small gallery like a cuddly, restive tiger cub held captive in a shoebox. Viewers had to stoop and then flatten themselves against walls as they circumnavigated the piece to experience it in its goofy, slightly unsettling entirety.

Pastor’s sculpture presents an image of cute, loony Christmas decorations run amok that seem to both shrink and elongate while thrashing about in some kind of wild tide. Like any well-conceived