Larry Bell has been making glass cubes for over forty years, continually refining and adjusting an already classic, pristine form. His work has come to embody a summa of West Coast Minimalism—crisp and rigorous, spartan and geometric, yet touched with a subtle ambient light and color that makes it a platform for surprisingly delicate and emotive nuances. Bell’s cubes, along with the work of California colleagues including Robert Irwin and James Turrell, offer softer gradations than Minimalism’s seemingly inflexible profile, deploying natural light to inject perceptual poetics into what otherwise

Ashley Macomber uses paint to suggest the contours of skin and fur with a precision of line more commonly associated with engraving. Her portraits of human-animal hybrids have a stiffness reminiscent of early New England portraiture, and her muted palette is accentuated by the choice of gouache and acrylic in preference to oil. Macomber proves herself technically proficient—she’s particularly adept at balancing warm and cool colors—but falls down when it comes to her work’s conceptual underpinnings. Though her application is seductive in its exactitude, the work’s raison d’être is on shakier