Painter, photographer, sculptor and designer Marischa Slusarski portrays the geography and inhabitants of a world that, while imaginary, speaks directly to the poetic, whimsical and emotional fabric of our own. Slusarski has always used a variety of media to give form and flesh to her menageries. Her early, deeply textured and painterly works depicting sexualized familial groups of anatomically anomalous forest creatures were grounded in an almost classical approach to stylized realism and muscular painting technique. Her latest works on paper and canvas build from those sensual surfaces of pigment and marble dust, adding other kinds of image-making, including vibrating post-folk line drawing and a black rain of text-based typography transfers, in an approach that is more illustrative, more self-consciously symbolic and emotionally raw. -Shana Nys Dambrot