School’s out in London, and children walking down Lisson Grove are especially well placed to spot the one element of Francis Alÿs’s show that’s clearly visible from the street. Sleepers, 1999, projected onto a two-way projection screen modestly taped to the gallery window at ground level, displays eighty 35 mm slides of people and dogs sleeping on the streets of Mexico City. Curled up in doorways, slumped on benches, prostrate on sunlit sidewalks, many of Alÿs’s human subjects are clearly destitute, provoking that familiar, inevitable attack of conscience in the relatively privileged gallerygoer.

Looking at Kristin Calabrese’s 1998 painting Stove & Fridge (Love), I couldn’t help but focus on the houseplant, which shares space with the dustpan, broom, and mop, as well as the fridge-mounted valentine, snapshots, and fortune-cookie slips. It reminded me of the scene in the 1987 film Wall Street where Bud Fox, a working-class boy with big dreams, stands in the living room of a corporate raider/art collector and gets read like a tea leaf by Darien, a socialite decorator who describes Bud in terms of the type of living space that includes a houseplant. Calabrese’s paintings cover a range of