The means of depiction is almost clinical in its precision, the scene rendered with a care and an attention to detail that seems at odds with the anonymity of what is represented: a city block disemboweled by conventional or atomic bombs, or Patriot missles, or grenades, or tanks, or whichever tools were chosen by the aggressors in the unspecified conflict that added this to the countless series of 21st-century urban sites that have been transformed into war zones.

"Conflict series no. 56:" Dozier Bell's title for this painting suggests a compassion that seeks to resist human horror by enumerating its instances and ruminating on each of them in turn. Indeed, the sensitivity of the hand applying the paint seems an ethical choice as much as an aesthetic one. The broken edges of gutted homes and closed streets are wreathed in smoke, the residue of private lives forced open. An unsettling light filters its way through the haze, capturing the forms of those structures that still stand, presenting them like tiny pearls in a shattered oyster shell.

Across the gallery, as if in a flashback, in Bell's "Oculus, 2," four targeting devices jockey with one another, crosshairs seeking to lock in convergence. At first glance, we are led to imagine that the unsuspecting mark, whatever it might be, is just a millisecond away from appearing on the screen and two milliseconds away from obliteration. However, after a few moments of inhabiting the viewfinder's gaze as it scans this horizonless skyscape, we wonder instead if the target is in fact the dull glow of the sun itself.

A variation on this theme appears in social theorist Paul Virilio's recent book Open Sky, which kicks off with the suggestion that one day, the day will come when the day doesn't come. We can read this literally, as a straightforward apocalyptic prediction that our end is near, or scarier still, that the end might have come a while ago and we haven't yet fathomed it. Or we can take it on a more poetic but no less political level as a suggestion that ours is a world whose sky has already fallen, and that what comes "when the day does not come" is a condition in which the certainties that we use to navigate our experience - life and death, war and peace, spirit and matter - dissolve into each other, into a chaotic world of perpetual mobilization from which there is no deliverance.

Bell's approach to the practice of painting is keyed in to these uncertainties and challenges; she considers her process "a way to research intuitions and ideas that feel urgent to me, because visual images have the capacity to bypass one's reasoning and to reach that part of the mind that seems to know more than it has the capacity to express. Therefore, I don't have a lot to say about the paintings themselves." But at the same time she refuses to use the gaps between seeing and saying as the justification for silence: "I can only talk about the thoughts and ideas that lead up to them," she says, inviting "the individual viewer to interpret the result according to their own experience."

Art historian Peggy Phelan has recently characterized the relation between art and art criticism in a way that perfectly parallels Bell's position. She writes: "I sometimes fear that art criticism and theory want to take the art out of art. I want less writing about art, more writing with art."

The ability to "write with" depends upon art that is crafted with the combination of technical skill, conceptual rigor, and poetic charge that Bell's work puts into play. One does not need to speak about these works, but may instead speak with them, speak to them, inhabit this space where meaning surpasses its visual container, where possibilities of connection and discovery are in excess of the forms that the languages of paint or of words can provide. Only then can the languages of art and of criticism move from encapsulating experience to working together to unpicking its potential.

"I have thought a great deal about the German word Heimsuchung," Bell notes, "which originally referred to a visitation by God, to God's knowing exactly where one is at every moment in one's life. In modern usage it almost exclusively refers to the singling out of a person or people for visitation by disasters such as plague, famine and war. And yet the term still encompasses these two extremes of human experience; everday contact with the divine, and the devastation and annihilation of the physical self and/or its environment. Between these two poles is implied the image of an omniscient being such as the God described by the psalmist of the 139th Psalm: 'one who discerns our thoughts from afar, in whose books were written all the days that were formed for us, when none of them as yet existed, and to whom darkness is as light."

Similarly, in each of her marks and in their sum total, Bell's work enacts a tension between the refusal of devastation and annihilation and a captivated curiosity about what leads to them, targeting both those war machines that make use of satellite imagery, wires and warheads, as well as those war machines that are made of flesh and bone.