In truth, Donna Sharrett's work is as luxe as it is calme, each object a mandala of pearls and flower petals and other delicate objects set into a wax-covered wooden box. But the overriding element in her work is order. “Mirroring the Buddhist mandala form, the circular shape enveloped by the square …characterizes the infinite within the finite,” says the artist. “The geometric schemes of Gothic cathedral windows and the numeric configurations of prayer beads inform the mathematical arrangements of the work.” Your Song, a memorial piece to her musician brother who died too soon, exemplifies Sharrett’s engagement with repetition, ritual and remembrance.

Julie Karabenick‘s paintings mine the infinte richness of a single rectilinear form. There is nothing meditative about the work—indeed, Karabenick consciously subverts the symmetry of her geometric endeavor—but each composition holds itself in easy equipoise. With its limited palette and uninflected color, Karabenick’s Composition 64 strikes me as a centered conversation, one that is spirited, inquisitive, but always returns to the main topic. Because her painting is process intensive and precise—“resolutely geometric” the artist describes it—the work goes slowly, but each successive painting in the series, with its new combination of asymmetry and complexity, expands the expression of Karabenick’s resoluteness.

The horizontal is a predominant element in Frances Barth’s paintings, which might be described as abstract landscapes with narrative timeline, a theme she began investigating early in her career and which she has continued to pursue. In this exhibition we show two works painted roughly a decade apart. The 1995 red-gr, simultaneously flat and deeply spatial, is vast enough to visually fall into—all the better to contemplate its contradictory dimensionality. In Barth’s newest work, such as the boldly horizontal Heat Glance, which she describes as “both object and panorama, “ you contemplate its light and space as if peering through a slot. It’s a tantalizing slice of imagined landscape and—this is a good thing—it leaves you wanting more.

Minus the e, the French word for luxury becomes the Latin lux, which means both luxury and light. Linguistically I’m stretching, but conceptually you can see where I’m going when I say that the work of the next three artists is all about illumination. Heather Hutchison has been working with translucence for two decades. She is one of the few artists who paints with beeswax on plexiglass. Working with a shadow box that holds a top surface and the space within, Hutchison is free to explore translucent on transparent and the ways light passes through the surface or is reflected from it. You see this clearly in Divided (warm), where gradations of translucence converse intimately with one another. The artist refers to her work as “post-Minimal,” which I take to mean that it embodies what Minimal is, a reductive presence, as well as what it is not, a surface that revels in its materiality.

For Rose Olson refractive pigments painted stripe on stripe, layer upon layer, create veils of iridescent color that change as the light hits them this way and that. Walk one way, you see one color; move slightly, and you see another. Olson calls this mutability “a quiet dialog of shifting color, shifting space.” Her substrate and ground are one and the same, maple plywood, which is visible, sometimes faintly, sometimes more so. In Diffusion Rising, as in the rest of her elegant oeuvre, Olson’s color shimmers over the surface as light as a breeze. Hexagram 20 of the I Ching is as good a description as any of her work: “Kuan/Contemplation. The wind above, the earth below. “

Chris Ashley’s HTML drawings are nothing without light, for they exist in their primary incarnation as ordered pixels on a screen. Ashley’s daily practice is to create a drawing a day on his blog using nothing but computer code, which then appears on the screen as a luminous geometric composition. This is Etch-a-Sketch for the 21st Century, though Ashley is clearly thinking outside the box: “I want to make images that encourage associations to nature, the body, place, thought, sound, language, social relations and history.” For this exhibition, Ashley has printed out a month’s worth of drawings—February 2007’s, called Jukebox 1-28—and arranged them in calendar format, while a year’s worth of HTML drawings flashes on a nearby screen.