Jane Dickson’s recent paintings present nocturnal and late-afternoon moments as seen from a vehicle driven by you, traveling viewer, as you move through transitional spaces on the margins of a city.

Faced in 1985 with Christopher Isherwood’s approaching death at 81 from prostate cancer, the portraitist Don Bachardy, Isherwood’s partner for over 30 years (and 30 years his junior), undertook to draw him daily. Thirty-four of those drawings were presented here, mostly chronologically, starting with Untitled I, July 16, in which Isherwood, wearing only socks and a watch and seated cross-legged, stares out at us apprehensively.

Stephen Westfall is a veteran abstractionist, a kind of practicing Mondrianist and one of the few artists still able to get fresh juice from a formalist approach to painting. His latest show further refines the major themes of his recent work. All the paintings in the show are oil and alkyd on canvas and of a small to medium size, except for a 104-inch-square wall painting in bold acrylic, The Truth is Marching On (For Albert Ayler), 2008.

Hell as described by Dante is re-envisioned by sculptor Robert Taplin in the works that comprised the exhibition “Everything Imagined Is Real (After Dante).” In a technical and expressive tour de force, Taplin leads us through the Inferno, beginning with the upper rings of hell where the venial, “lite” sinners are trapped. He follows Dante as the poet descends into the dark wood of his own psyche, meeting Virgil, crossing the river Acheron, and passing through Limbo on the way to the gathering storms of lust, the slime of gluttony and tyranny of avarice. Finally, he crosses the river Styx to the city of Dis, where all hell really breaks loose.

On the one hand, Brian Tolle’s small-scale painted silicone reproductions of the mass-produced houses of Levittown are ghastly specters. Detailed and highly evocative flayed skins (not quite Michelangelo’s self-portrait in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment, but that’s the idea), they are draped over haunting, period-appropriate supports. On the other, they are big, goofy busted toys—rubber balls with the air let out. Or, each is an unstable mix of the two, a drama deflated, the loss in grandeur a gain for situation comedy.