Jacques Lacan once observed, “In the human being, virile display itself appears as feminine.” The title of Joe Sola’s recent exhibition, “Taking a Bullet,” first mounted at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, hints at a similar paradox. Sola evokes memories of Hollywood genre films, suggesting that the person offering up the ultimate sacrifice is most likely to be either a man’s male buddy or a femme fatale. The gesture itself—the refusal to get out of harm’s way—combines stereotypically masculine action with stereotypically feminine passivity, and this dialectic is at the heart of Sola’s