Lady in Dark

Mari Eastman is a mixed-media artist whose heart belongs to a relatively old-fashioned form of picture-making. Ms. Eastman veers from painting to drawing to illustration and beyond, working on canvas, on paper and on the wall. She uses glitter, stencil and stain painting; she works from photographs, manages some crude embroidery and also paints on handmade clothes.

Images don't always conform neatly to a single surface, but travel across several, most spectacularly in the case of a spray-painted mountain range that moves across the entire length of the gallery, figuring in most of the paintings and drawings that cross its path.

A result is a pictorial installation that mixes early 1980's appropriation with early 90's abject art, and has a light, improvisational touch of its own. Ms. Eastman's subjects, which range from fashion models to eagle's nests, lone wolves and Bambi-like deer, alternate nature with culture, urban with wild, but tend to conjure one kind of romance or another.