For the artist Rob Mango, the city is a dream theater, the setting for an epic drama played out across space and time. The city is New York, with its familiar landmarks, but a fantastic Gotham populated by fierce and beautiful figures, imposing enough to rival the towers around them. These personages, from many epochs and cultures, seem to have emerged from an elevated realm where gods, warriors, and a panoply of mythic characters coexist. In Mango’s series Rhapsody, these figures each represent the artist in the changing symbolic guises of hero, fool, and magus. In his allegorical paintings, the artist is a shape-shifter who encounters the city’s terrors, alluring seductions, and startling epiphanies, but he himself is never fully knowable. At stake is the artist’s power to make his mark in the face the forces that would render him powerless, and then to rise again in a new form.