In 1987, as Liz Larner’s career came into focus, she was making modest but vivid sculptures out of petri dishes chock-full of ingredients fertile with bacteria destined to “bloom” into decay (e.g., Whipped Cream, Heroin, and Salmon Eggs [3 weeks]). Back then it would have been difficult to imagine her work ever getting caught up in an effete debate over the relationship between form and color, the nattering between the likes of Anthony Caro, Michael Fried, and George Sugarman. But it has. In 1988, one flinched at a safe distance from Corner Basher; as ball and chain whipped into ruin the corner

Delia Brown’s recent show, her first at Margo Leavin, comprised thirty-six drawings, watercolors, and oil and acrylic paintings (all 2001) depicting the intertwined lives of a young woman and her mother. The models for these roles are Brown herself and the gallerist Leavin, respectively. The set is Leavin’s home. Together the two women inspect the bounty of their garden, hang out poolside, and have predictable mother-daughter spats. They chat as they go about their daily grooming. A thermometer-wielding Leavin dotes on a sniffly Brown, curled up in bed with the remote control.

If you’re not in

In a career defined by attempts to give physical form to complex language-based narratives, Mary Kelly has generally kept her work visually lean. Her installations tend to betray the aesthetic inheritance from the Minimalism and Conceptualism that defined her generation’s coming of age. As a viewer, I have found myself at times wanting more—not because I wished the work were luscious or heroic (either would seem out of sync with Kelly’s interest in psychological residue, trauma, personal history identity formation, human interactions, and social hierarchies), but because I wanted it to catch my