With its tenuous illumination at floor level, the gallery space seemed to be at the bottom of a swimming pool, if not undersea. On the walls, Kraken (all works 2012), paintings made with squid ink, evoked mythological sea monsters. A mirrored ceiling doubled the space as well as the milky light of a video, The Unplayed Notes, made by using a thermal camera to chart the warmest areas of two coupling bodies. Formless sculptures, like black coral colonies, slowly rotated on axis; each titled Twain Rocks, they are made of pages from Mark Twain’s novels. Electric guitar chords (recorded by Lee Ranaldo

Over the past decade, French ceramicist Elsa Sahal has conceived a universe where ostensible contradictions—abstraction versus figuration, male versus female, adorable versus abject—are reconciled into a variety of unsettling biomorphic forms. In her most recent exhibition, Sahal expanded her repertoire of tubular phalluses and thick-lipped orifices dribbled with syrupy glazes, creating two new breeds of large-scale androgynous figures. Explicitly corporeal, if not always blatantly figural, the sculptures are perhaps best described as bodies of clay—insistently of and about their