LISA LAPINSKI MOVES regularly among media and craft traditions in her work, drawing from a wide variety of artistic and architectural lineages, models, and methodologies—often combining seemingly incompatible iconographies and motifs. As a result, the artist places enormous importance on the audience’s consideration not only of objects but also of the theoretical and cultural glues bonding disparate things together. In this regard, her aggregated output could be said to recall the concept of “systems esthetics,” articulated forty years ago in these pages by Jack Burnham. “We are now in

HER EYES ICY BLUE, WITH THE LOOK OF SOMEONE WHO HAS ACHIEVED BLINDNESS BY AN ACT OF WILL AND MEANS TO KEEP IT. This line, lifted from Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People,” becomes sculptural in a signature work of Roni Horn’s: Each letter is made in three dimensions, in white plastic, and embedded in a long aluminum bar. Fusing Donald Judd’s objecthood with Lawrence Weiner’s linguistic conception of sculpture—and pushing both into literary terrain—this work, titled Her Eyes (Achieving Blindness), was hung horizontally, high on a wall, and alone in one room of Horn’s first solo

An acoustic aviary of electronic squawks, chirps, and beating wings. A choir of insects signaling polyphonically in the dark. The clicking of frogs. Suction slaps. Aerosol sprays. Sustained static drones periodically spliced by jarring pops. These sounds circulated in and among the three collaborative works in Stephen Vitiello’s exhibition “Duets.” Charged with the conversational dynamics of exchange, each “duet” pairs Vitiello’s multichannel sonic creations with a visual artist’s work. Crazy Wall Thing, 2005, for example, is a playful, if expendable, collaboration with Tony Oursler in which