The ability to create increasingly convincing virtual worlds using computer technology has reopened pictorial space beyond the canvas: it has become habitable. The phenomenological cast of so much recent art, with its insistence on “real” space, time, bodily presence, and so on, gives sensual fullness to the act of seeing. It is this new perceptual space that Lydia Dona examines in her painting.

Three large, body-proportioned canvases hung on the left wall and four smaller paintings were displayed beyond a large window toward the back of the room on the right. Both in their size and configuration,