A window on an unrushed world

The car is usually just a means to get between point A and point B, not a place to be here now, especially during the rush-hour commute. Artist Hannah Cole looks at it differently. She focuses her entire painting exhibit at Alpha Gallery on the skin of glass and steel that encloses and isolates the driver from the world speeding by outside.

The car makes a natural metaphor for the way we rush from childhood to old age, rarely stopping to enjoy the view. Cole is young; she just got her master's degree at Boston University last year. But she is an exacting and vivid painter, taking note of such small wonders as the texture of grime on a window.

The best works in the show use detail to create a surprisingly rich world along the boundary between those within a car and what's outside it (several smaller, nighttime works feel cursory in comparison). In ``Closer Than They Appear," the lemony green of a spring forest whooshes past in a blur of dizzy brushwork, mixing with a reflection in the passenger-side window of a woman doing a crossword puzzle. The painting is a self-portrait; those are Cole's hands doing the puzzle and her face in the rear-view mirror, which also captures the sunlight and reflections of the passing scenery. There are so many deftly painted degrees of reflection in this work, it's a hall of mirrors, a realist painter's foray into meta-reality.

``Losing the Plot" puts us behind the wheel of a cold automobile on a frigid morning. Frost crawls in crystals and speckles up the windshield over the dark arc of the dashboard; the ice looks creamy in the winter sunlight. The silhouette of a bare tree in the distance echoes the branching of ice as the defroster kicks in and starts to melt away the pale shroud that's grown over the car overnight. It's an intricately planned, well-executed painting. Cole has scrutinized an experience most people wish would just be over, and in all the small details she has found surprising beauty.

``Drawings and a Sculpture," Patrick Strzelec's dark and playful show at OH+T gallery's new storefront digs on Thayer Street, is misnamed; there are actually three sculptures. It's not clear whether two of them -- giant, noodly mounds of rubber on aluminum disks -- function as one work or as two. They're listed as two, but referred to in the press release as ``an untitled floor piece." The ambiguity fits for this show, which seems to be all about the tentative, fraught nature of relationship and the balancing act between individuals and the groups they make up.

Strzelec takes a child's pleasure in tactile material, color, and deliberately messy form. The wormy tangles of rubber in Crayola red and yellow are both inviting and forbidding. They seem to leer at and tease each other. What a mess they would make if the two got snarled together. His drawings, in glistening silicone platinum on paper, look as if Strzelec has taken a spoon out of melted candy and deliciously dribbled it, mostly in groups of circular forms that hover near one another but don't touch.

The one exception is the third sculpture, a sleek, minimalist seesaw with powder-blue seats on either end of a steel arc, which makes a subtle S-curve. Here the messiness is merely implied: If you got on the teeter-totter with a partner, the two of you might be in for a crash landing.

Karen Moss is nothing if not versatile; every project she works on seems totally new and unrelated to her previous work. When last we saw her, she was building trees out of recycled magazines. In her new show at Pepper Gallery, she's riffing on coloring books from the 1940s and '50s, when she was a kid.

Three bodies of work -- all acrylic or ink on paper -- use the bold lines and bright tones of that style. In the best, a wonderfully freakish and disturbing group, contorted hybrid animals put a B-movie spin on the Dick and Jane world evoked by the coloring-book style. ``Day at the Mall" has a snarky-looking pig with a lamb's body mincing through a mall beside a plump dog with a hog's tail. Genetic engineering and animal feed laced with hormones and antibiotics have changed life on the farm into a nightmare.

The other two groups are less effective. One appears autobiographical, following a little blond girl as she studies history and geography; in ``The Mighty Brush," she carries a giant paintbrush. These works are mildly sentimental and not nuanced enough.

Finally, a series of walnut-ink-on-paper drawings comment too pointedly on how society is corrupting childhood innocence, with bonbons and sexpot dolls and toy guns. So what's new?

Hannah Cole: New Paintings
At: Alpha Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Oct. 4. 617-536-4465, www.alphagallery.com

Patrick Strzelec: Drawings and a Sculpture
At: OH+T gallery, 450 Harrison Ave., through Oct. 7. 617-423-1677, www.ohtgallery.com

Karen Moss: Coloring Book
Hybrids: An Artist Reinterprets Childhood
At: Pepper Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Oct. 7. 617-236-4497