Art: Major Art Attack

And the canvases? They were tumultuous, freely painted scenes adroitly situated along the luscious, porous border between abstraction and figuration. In Brown's work, pigment can dematerialize the very forms it assembles. But when recognizable images emerge, they tend to be recognizably about sex. Explicit genitalia and explosive couplings are not uncommon, though for a while she liked to put rabbits in place of humans.

"I didn't know sex would be at the center of my work for so long," she says. "I sometimes wonder if I'm going to outgrow it." But with Brown it's not just the imagery that's erotic; it's the paint itself. She has a swashbuckling way with a brush. She knows something about the carnal qualities of oil paint, how the lustrous muck of pigment is the great correlative for everything moist and blending and libidinal.

The daughter of the late British art critic David Sylvester, Brown also knows that behind her images stand Willem de Kooning's grinning women in their storms of whiplashing abstraction. So do the erotic wrestlings of Francis Bacon, in those arenas where it's the body that's always the contested ground. But what appeals to her most, she says, is a "restrained carnality"--what you find in Velazquez or Chardin. "I'd like to make a painting where the sex is all implicit."

So here's Black Painting 2, in which a recumbent female may or may not be touching herself sexually with a faintly indicated hand. Above her head, the dark flood of the subconscious pumps. Lately Brown is even painting pure landscapes. "Woods and trees," she says. "It's very British." True enough, but keep an eye out for what's going on behind those bushes.

DEBORAH STRATMAN Night Vision

We all know what happens to video art. It plays to sparse audiences in a dark museum room that people leave after a few curious but dutiful minutes.

If you don't mind, stay in that room. Deborah Stratman's strange video, In Order Not to Be Here, is not a movie. And at least not until its chilling and lovely conclusion, it will not satisfy your expectations of a narrative arc. Stratman, 36, has made videos in the past, like The BLVD, about drag racing down the streets of Chicago, that resemble documentaries. That is, if the documentary form allowed lingering passages of moody nighttime shop fronts. But her 33-min. video for the Biennial is different. It's mood music made from bad moods.

After an introduction that shows aerial footage of a suspect being taken into custody by cops with dogs, Stratman assembles images that appear to be made by surveillance cameras trained on bleak suburban nowheres--mall parking lots, ATMs, inhospitable private homes. This is what our fears look like: not pretty but, in a strange way, absorbing. The video ends with a simulated cop chase, seen from above, in night-vision photography. You know the man fleeing is the "perpetrator." All the same, you hope he gets away.