of Vermeer and the solitude of Edward Hopper. In later paintings, Blair turned to landscape, close-cropped flower images, views through obscured windows, and in the 2000s, to close-ups of eyes and nocturnal parking lots and snow scenes. Christopher Knight describes these later works largely devoid of people as "brimming over with unconquerable wanderlust." In the mid-1990s, Blair began producing décor-like works inspired by contemporary corporate and domestic design and guided by Japanese flower arrangement rules. They compress installation-work elements of light, material, color and image into discrete, hybrid sculptures that evoke interiors, furniture, drawing, architecture, landscapes and the human body. Blair carefully manipulates elements such as electrical cords unfurling like lines across color-fields of industrial carpet, Plexiglas and plywood, lightboxes, shipping crates and lamps, seeking a balance in which objects retain their specificity yet read together as singular works. Paralleling his gouaches, the earlier sculptures examine themes involving atmosphere, designed space and consumer culture, while his post-2006 works take up phenomenological issues relating to the body, such as ocular versus corporeal experience of images, objects and space. Later exhibitions Blair's exhibitions at Feature (2001, 2004) and Mary Goldman (2005) inclined toward increasingly spare, refined presentation. They paired gouache paintings of lyrical water-streaked windows and flowers with electrical cord and geometric carpet lengths, glowing boxes and low-slung Minimalist objects, creating spaces that reviews describe as calming, mysterious and melancholic domestic tableaux (e.g. Some Of and And When, 2001; to want to, 2005). The Brooklyn Rail compared the effect of these exhibitions to the ambient music of artists such as Brian Eno, "tastefully calibrating" momentary experience, while remaining ambivalent about the consequences for subjectivity of living in a thoroughly designed world. In the later 2000s, Blair placed greater emphasis on perceptual issues, introducing close-up paintings of women's eyes and painted shipping crates that simultaneously evoke functional objects, picture planes, space dividers, walls and figures. For the survey, "Dike Blair: Now and Again" (Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2009), he produced a subtly staged and lit experience involving two sculpture courts—mirror layouts to one another invoking the space in its entirety—that flanked a series of galleries housing his gouaches; Artforum described the show as an intimate and uncanny meditation on experiencing versus seeing, real versus illusionistic space. In exhibitions at Gagosian (2010], Feature (2013), Linn Lühn (2014) and Jürgen Becker Gallery (2017), Blair continued to expand the range of allusions and effects, painting crate-sculpture sides