Hey kids, remember Gaëtan Dugas?

Canadian airline steward. Introduced AIDS into North America. Aka “Patient Zero.” The deadly nightshade of such fiction, produced to rationalize and naturalize the world’s terror, darkens the glamour of Steven Gontarski’s sculpture Prophet Zero I (all works 2003). His slim-hipped, pearlescent ephebe wears not a gnarga (a feline mask behind which baroque fags would catcall come-ons to fetching lads) but a medico della peste, a birdlike face cover sported by doctors during the plague years, with a beak filled with spices to purify the air breathed, here tipped with

In his first exhibition at this gallery, Jorge Pardo could be said to “deliver” without ever ceasing to hold back. First, there is the requisite upping of the ante, perfectly in keeping with the heightened expectations that come with this new territory, and then there is a deflation, also requisite. Pardo gives us a great deal to work with—perhaps too much—but pointedly leaves out the directions. Accordingly, the questions of what we should focus our attention on, how we should distinguish the fore-, middle-, and background, and where in the ensuing melee we stand are raised at every turn.

Overall,

An artist who operated in the same late-’60s circles as Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner and whose work was included in early exhibitions of Conceptual and post-Minimalist art such as “Electric Art” at UCLA (1969), “Prospect 69” at the Kunsthalle Du¨sseldorf, and “Concept Art” at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970), Eugenia Butler has been as pioneering as any practitioner in her field. Yet as curator Anne Ayres notes in this exhibition’s catalogue, history has granted Butler less than her due. In a move toward a remedy, Ayres, building on the research and