For his first show at François Ghebaly, in late 2019, Sharif Farrag debuted pots sprouting arms and gargantuan, technically improbable vases cleaved to expose orifices. Overall, their anthropomorphism was unapologetically libertine, their sensibility underscored by glistening coats of lavish glaze: Sometimes it dripped down the clay contours as an independent, physicalized entity; at others it became nearly selfsame with the forms. Six months later, Farrag presented new porcelain and stoneware works, one of which he made in quarantine, alongside related works on paper. (The drawing Signal Hill

Paul Mpagi Sepuya makes images that coyly invite close looking. In what are essentially studio portraits, Sepuya photographs his subjects—himself, his friends, and his cameras—in mirror reflections that are often doubly echoed on the luminescent screens of iPhones held aloft. The intricate relay of signifying surfaces in Sepuya’s photos may bring to mind Foucault’s essay on Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas. Explaining the viewer’s relationship to the painting’s ambiguous subject, the theorist writes that the painting contains “a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges, and feints,”

On the cover of the first edition of Kathy Acker’s 1978 novel, Blood and Guts in High School, is an image by Sue Coe: a gleaming scene of nighttime danger wherein sentient, money-hungry tenements spit out ghostlike apparitions. They are in turn inhaled by the painting’s central figure, a lanky gang member whose chest tattoo indicates that he’s affiliated with the Scorpions. Sitting on his knee is a cat that opens its mouth in a furious and frightening yowl. Hard glints of light—like sparks struck off a dense flint—provide only the barest of illumination. It is not the kind of image one might