The paintings in Rachel Howard's second solo exhibition are variations on a theme: the color red. Yet it would be a mistake to see her as essentially a colorist. While her earlier squares of poured paint were rigorously flat and opaque, done in one go, these new, more layered works seem indifferent to the once loaded antithesis between surface and depth, frontality and atmosphere, allowing for both. Damien Hirst (who used to employ Howard to execute his dot paintings) remarks to the artist in a conversation published in the show's catalogue, “Your work is on the edge of painting and sculpture.”

Todd Haynes's curious film Safe (1995) tells the tale of a woman who becomes “allergic to the twentieth century”: Developing a morbid sensitivity to everyday chemical substances, she quits her post as a dutiful American mother, housewife, and consumer and seeks a cure in a nightmarish, isolated “healing community.” Is she the victim of material pollutants, society's crushing psychological demands—or both? The film leaves the question unanswered, suggestively blurring the line between modem living's physical and mental incursions. In this way it anticipates the controversial ideas of such