Two Photographs by John Coplans

Three self-portraits by Kiki Smith.

Their legs are offered to the viewer in a vase of shadow and stone. One kicks like a stem tilts. They are clearly angels’ legs, celestial dancers, moving on an axis of stilled time. So does Venus, emerging from cloth like a snake in a basket, her own snake and her own apple. Stiff dead Egyptians can be sexy, sensuous like a fossil with a heartbeat. The most overtly sexy female in her Empire recliner is more removed. Her chaise, like a vitrine, shows her off but it offers her less.

The landscapes are where the blackness lives in the photographs. The blackness has its own inner density, printed with absoluteness like a mezzotint. How can we get to the light when the darkness and weight are so inviting? The mossy fountain burgeons with life, a vanitas. The waterfall fountain is a thing unto itself like the Venus, its own dais and its own axis, turning almost imperceptibly. It spills to renew itself.

—April Gornik

Two black-and-white self-portraits by Claudia Hart, labeled “The Spirit of Humanism” and “The Spirit of Marxism.”