DOUGLAS WADA'S NEW PAINTINGS depict icons of American life—things that otherwise tend to escape notice, like subway seats, garbage cans, lockers, streetlights, air conditioners, suitcases, and loudspeakers. Wada isolates individual objects in a flat, usually monochromatically white pictorial space—except when the subject fills the entire image, as in Girlschool, 2001, which shows a row of dark blue-green lockers—so that the pictorial surface and the wall behind it can hardly be distinguished at a distance: a quotation-like play with painterly illusionism through which the images gain a