Joe Light’s painting Kiera, 1989, is an undulating, almost corporeal landscape anchored by three red hills set against a light-blue sky. In the pink foreground are a trio of pronged forms that resemble the branches of denuded trees—or perhaps even desert wanderers with their arms outstretched to heaven. The composition calls to mind Georgia O’Keeffe’s early abstractions based on New York’s Lake George, in which sloping ovoid forms become mountains and clouds. But zooming out to take in Kiera, alongside the seven other house-paint-on-plywood works at Institute 193, the viewer might have apprehended