You could easily miss them, the flies—or mistake them for only flies, sunning on the glass, as flies do. In fact, Two fly fishing flies cannot consummate through a BB bullet hole (2019) is a tiny sculpture by Alexandra Noel. The title says it all: two faux, iridescent insects are attached face-to-face through a small round puncture in the front window of Potts gallery in Los Angeles. The flies are doubled, like the two B’s in BB—mirrored, but complementary, seemingly attempting to mate. Noel mostly makes paintings—small ones, although not fly-small. The sculpture is an outlier in Noel’s work, but also embodies the compressed drama of the rest: inert but tense, jewellike and precise, an erratum that’s the rule.

Mousse 76: Out Now