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.

From Brueghel to Bruce Nauman, artists have taken on those standard Christian vices, the Seven Deadly Sins. As if to suit our relatively secular era, when such inventories might seem passé, actor and painter Martin Mull recently offered, at Stellan Holm, a fittingly tongue-in-cheek interpretation. As in his previous work, he continues to mine photographic imagery of postwar America, edging each canvas with a painted gray or brown border as if to refer to its photographic source.

In the exhibition “Spiral City & Other Vicarious Pleasures,” Melanie Smith, a native of Britain living in Mexico City since 1989, grapples with her adopted city’s immense scale and vast energies, as well as her own feelings of displacement—mainly by abstracting and obscuring them. The videos, paintings, photography and installations dating from 1992 to 2006 in this traveling survey, organized by independent curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, gather oblique perceptions of one of the world’s largest urban sprawls.

New Yorkers know Jun Kaneko’s work from the procession of three serenely monumental ceramic heads arrayed along Park Avenue last summer and fall. In Philadelphia, related aspects of Kaneko’s work could be seen in a recent exhibition at Locks Gallery that coincided with a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio mounted by the Opera Company of Philadelphia at the Academy of Music and featuring the artist’s stage and costume design.