Mysticism and mystery

Commercial galleries often wait until the drowsy summer months to show untried artists. Alpha Gallery is the first out of the gates with its ``New Talent" show each June. This year's exhibition, featuring three painters and a photographer, has fizzy appeal. The work is sharp and eye-catching. While technically accomplished, it's also -- in three of the four cases -- the work of young artists who have chosen a theme and hammered it home, rather than letting it open up and evolve.

The exception is Shalini M. Bhat , who just received her master's degree at Boston University. Bhat came to Boston from her native India; her paintings embrace both Eastern mysticism and the Western push toward individuality. Bhat paints in dreamy layers of cobalt blue; drawings and patterns emerge along the surface, and all mysteriously tie together.

``Me and Her" shows two figures facing each other -- both self-portraits of Bhat in a yoga posture with shoulders raised and hands held up. One wears traditional Indian garb; the other wears loose pants and a T-shirt. Palm prints walk through the sea of blue around them; green patterns swirl into dissolving ribbons. Orange strands from the figures' hair dance all over the canvas and land on the head of another woman in the distance. So much quietly happens here, it's engrossing.

Another BU graduate, Elizabeth Livingston imbues her realist paintings with Hitchcockian edginess. ``58 Verndale" has the dramatic lighting of one of Gregory Crewdson's spooky photographs, with a dark, suburban house filling the background, and a dour young woman standing across from a garish forsythia in the foreground. If Livingston's not upending the viewer with light and shadow, she uses perspective. In ``Oak Hill," bowls and a serving fork loom in the foreground as a young woman gazes out a window.

Shira Avidor , also from BU (Alpha has a long history with the BU MFA program), paints rail-thin, distorted, and implacable young women surrounded by platters of sweets. It's today's version of the Dutch still life, with an anorexic twist. As with the Dutch works, there's the reminder of life's fleeting quality, even amid the plenty. In ``Jamie W ith Meringues," a skull sits on the table, its teeth resting unnervingly on one of the plates.

Robert Knight , the sole photographer, shoots interiors of people's homes as if they were portraits. These are telling and rich, although not as layered as an actual portrait can be. ``Stephen, Boston (South End) MA" shows the ornate, pillow-tossed bed against a wall papered, apparently, with silver-leaf and adorned with crystal sconces.

Knight, Avidor, and Livingston each take a particular focus or tension and hone it to a psychological knife's edge. Bhat has tension in her work as well, but she doesn't seem interested in ratcheting it up; she's more interested in what it has to tell her, and that makes for more nuanced art.

Matt Harle's sculptures never fail to surprise me. His new show at Genovese/Sullivan Gallery features his love of color, and his trademark endearing awkwardness that at first glance seems almost homely, but then turns out to be full of grace and humor. In the past, he's worked in pink Styrofoam and black rubber. Here, it's plywood sticks tacked together to resemble trees, encased in sheaths of mylar, pale and translucent as vellum.

Like most of Harle's work, it looks as if he rigged it up for a seventh-grade art fair. Yet there are wonderful subtleties. He cuts patterns into the mylar that reveal the plywood, often brightly painted and forming other patterns inside. Light seems to ricochet within each piece; vivid colors, cloaked in mylar, take on soft glows. In one untitled floor sculpture, he has cut from the mylar shapes that mirror the negative space between his plywood branches, so we see just edges of red within. Walk to the back of the piece, which is uncut, and the shimmer of shadow and light there is so faceted it is almost Impressionist.

Karin Stack's clever photographs at Locco Ritoro are delightfully perplexing. She sets up miniature scenes with toys, but seen in the context of a photograph, they seem lifelike. Sometimes she paints her backdrops, or creates them with fabric; sometimes she shoots outside. Trying to figure out what's real and what's not is part of the fun. ``Staring at Sea/Granite Cliff" shows a red, turbaned figure, standing on a cliff's edge, gazing out over a glimmering sea. The figure is a toy; the cliff, a rock, and the convincing sea turns out to be glossy material lit to shine like water.

Stack is hardly the first to photograph small-scale models; James Casebere and Lori Nix are two expert practitioners. But Stack's work is more homespun. She's not trying to make elaborate little worlds. Her goal is to see how far she can get us to suspend our disbelief, if not about a red action figure, then about where he stands in the world. She often leaves us satisfyingly hanging.

New Talent

At: Alpha Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through June 30. 617-536-4465, www.alphagallery.com.

Matt Harle: Some Lions Do Not Walk -- Some Lions Do Walk

At: Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through July 1. 617-426-9738, www.genovesesullivan.com.

Karin Stack: Believe You Me

At: Locco Ritoro, 450 Harrison Ave., through June 30. 617-542-1010, www.loccoritoro.com.