Waltercio Caldas’s drawing 1, 2009, is a straightforward composition of india ink and pins on paper; two diamond forms—one small and red; the other, larger and black—slightly intersect near a spot of printed text reading simples. While this word (a plural) seems to describe the adjacent shapes, its placement here is curious for an artist who rarely uses text, even if he repeatedly references the textual. Caldas typically makes abstract sculptures that signify the syntactic movement of language, as if diagramming a sentence. By applying to his materials a set of formal guidelines—for example,

Liz Craft derives inspiration from any manner of cultural fodder: from high to low, from mundane to fantastic. Often, the spark seems to come when she mashes multiple aesthetics together, as in the sculptures featured in “Death of a Clown,” an exhibition of work from 2010. Several pieces see her combining the most debased of cultural forms (pictures of clowns and flowers, living-room furniture) with the loftiest (geometric abstraction, Minimalism) and some in between (Pop art, assemblage, hyperrealism).

A group of wall-hung pieces incorporate the grid—as much a standard of modernism and Minimalism

Justin Beal’s second solo exhibition continues his project of revealing the repressed of modernist architecture and design. At first encounter, his wall-mounted sculptures seem ascetic, cold. Slabs of slick-surfaced materials—aluminum, Plexiglas, and mirror—are bound together by plastic stretch wrap, often coated with glossy black and white enamel. In some pieces, the wrap delineates the contours of a hidden, protruding hexahedron; in others, it captures a tangle of transparent tubing, whose length grazes the floor. The work appears to be a simple rehashing of Minimalist aesthetics with up-to-date