To posthumously make myth of an artist risks bathos. Powell, who died in 2015, left just enough worthwhile sculpture and drawing behind to assemble a minor museum display. To turn her unassuming bronze, glass, and marble pieces — body parts, stones, celebratory medals — into a gallery show that’d make her name again requires a gimmick. 

This “studio” display, which tricks the viewer into seeing more than is offers, leverages the anachronism already present in Powell’s practice. Despite making work for public circulation at the turn of the millennium, Powell operated in registers that code her decades earlier. Spectres of Surrealism are overt and a mix of ephemerality and longevity lands poignantly next to the maker’s “untimely death” flagged in the show’s introduction.

How much of this is warranted and how much merely a reflex of “women’s art”? Powell was a medallist, yet not a medal recipient. Her studio is no cause for rerunning the competition.