On fourteen linen canvases, some stretched as wide as a picture window, others small enough to slip into the palm of your hand, Christine Safa had painted landscape and figurative imagery. Dreamlike in their disorienting oscillations of scale and approach, Safa’s compositions are ones in which a mountain can become a forehead, the crook of a shoulder a valley, a shadow the sea. Her works are titled with lines from her poems or from things she’s read, the proximity of word and image echoing the intimacy she creates between geography and the human figure.

In Safa’s poetry and canvases, the catalyst

THE FIRST THING ONE HEARS is the sound of rapid-fire typing. Projected onto an otherwise dark wall kitty-corner to the exhibition entrance, words flash into view and then disappear in an ongoing stream of text. The ephemeral lines (for example, LOTS OF DIFFERENT INSTRUMENTS / MUSIC WITH A GOOD BEAT—GUITAR, DRUMS) occasionally recall Lawrence Weiner propositions, linguistically conjuring things not otherwise present to the viewer’s senses. They accompany a monitor silently playing the 1968 film The Party and reflect a hired typist’s unique, uninterrupted attempt to describe the movie’s confounding