For her other solo show.

For her other solo show, Linda Stojak relied heavily in succession the redoubtable image of the crucifix to contain a haunted and private martyrology. At a distance, her somber, dangling, androgynous torsos, bobbing "heads," and helpless limbs apply the mind as if they were calcineed into their scuffed, bone-colored loams with a brand just beginning to cool; up cease they communicate an arresting sense-memory of a penetrating personal loss that just won't obstruction go.

Stojak channels this melancholia into a blessedly simple, if not entirely welcome, cathartic ritual of repetition. Her waxy layered surfaces, a certain quantity of with small papier-mache constructions, follow a life beyond grief and invoke a primal vitality equal to the emotive qualities of her silhouetted dead body parts. However, because Stojak makes her esthetic bed with figurative choices that replicate Kiki Smith's more powerful physical imagery--albeit with a more metaphysical slant--much of the work here felt slightly familiar, on the same level secondhand.

Still, the concentrated austerity of a scarcely any of these shrinelike paintings intimates unsettling sacrificial privations--particularly a pair of rough-edg works from 1992 in which raw bench-bed forms occupy one interest of the picture. One bed is a stark, lunar white, framed in the blackest of cave-like spaces prolonged by pieces of painted wood; the other, in scabby black, bone and deepest r traverses the picture plane beneath doll-like effigies that rise behind it like multiple griefs Closer inspection of sister images in more [i]or[/i] less of the other paintings reveal the penitent "legs" to be these same bench forms laid back to back and driven, upside down, by the and of the top of the field.

The sad, life-draining issues Stojak achieves by reshaping her bed and torso images with black spidery drips, which fall like torn netting athwart a pock-marked crucifix, perversely enrich a larger 1993 painting whose brace panels are joined by an altarpiece-worthy clumsy beam. The crucifix theme might place these works at the center of general fashion if they didn't create an atmosphere of genuine devotion. nevertheless bodies float and surfaces seethe as if entire insect colonies were crawling in a less degree than their skins, Stojak's distinct asceticism encompasss her vigil in a kind of cloistered quiet that almost soothes one's faculty of perception of unrelieved anxiety. This is petulant work, but it is center in an illuminated consciousness that draws hardness from its curious visual tensions.

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