Previously shown in London and New York, Roger Hiorns’s atomized jet engine, Untitled, 2008–, arrived at Marc Foxx in Los Angeles after a significant delay. To be preceded by its reputation was, however, perfectly appropriate for a sculpture that began as a hypothetical proposition—one of several ritualistic activities described but not performed in the monologue Benign, which Hiorns debuted at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006. In fact, the work’s very effect hinges on this gap between the seductiveness of its material presence (a small sea of swelling particulate matter filling the

As is well known, artists such as Cindy Sherman and Louise Lawler emerged in the late 1970s with work that effected a critique of representation through the détournement of photographic and filmic tropes. This unusually tight summer show proposed an innovation of that older critical strategy, wherein “pictures” have been superseded by multiplatform and thoroughly transmutable “images.” Most of the fourteen artists featured here were born during the years when the Pictures generation was first being identified as such; they make work in which images are submitted to a state of continuous transmission

For such gendered mythological creatures, mermaids have a peculiarly sexless anatomy, at least below their scaled hips. So when Allison Schulnik paints a work like Mermaid with Legs (all works cited, 2012)—a large canvas depicting a seated nude spreading her legs to the viewer—she grants these half-women not only their sexuality but their personhood too. Similarly positioned, Mermaid with Legs #2 features a figure surrounded by brushy, flowerlike patterns that radiate across the surface of the canvas. Included in her recent exhibition “Salty Air,” these pictures are typical of Schulnik’s