At Second Gallery, a colorful combination of culture and nature

"Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad's searing critique of imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, is not part of the nursery school curriculum. If it were, it would look like Saya Woolfalk's "Winter Garden," a cunning and funny installation and video at Second Gallery.

Woolfalk has painted the walls of the gallery's loft with bright, stylized trees against blue skies, and filled it with fantastical pillows and dolls. There's a giant topsy-turvy doll, legless with voluminous skirts, a white girl at one end and a black girl at the other. Two costumes stand along one wall like life-size rag dolls. They're loose and bright with an abundance of color and pattern, caricatures of indigenous garb in Africa and North America.

In the video, two performers wearing these costumes careen about, apparently headless, tossing the topsy-turvy doll between them. Sometimes they're playful, sometimes threatening. They represent a colonizer's dream of savages: enthralling, dangerous, and dark. Yet in this context they also cleverly recall The Wiggles' character Henry the Purple Octopus. Woolfalk ramps up the tension between innocence and perceived threat, then turns it on its head by asking us to see through the eyes of a child.

``Winter Garden" is part of "Peace King Mother Nature," the first of two exhibitions at Second Gallery to examine the ways in which we polarize ideas of nature and culture. The other pieces in the show don't have the depth and breadth of Woolfalk's, but Michael Bell-Smith's ``Up and Away" video, featuring recycled nature imagery from video games and cartoons, is hypnotic eye candy.

A patch of the forest floor made by Diane Carr and eroding sand-and-moss islands by Thomas Doran contrast getting lost in the details with big-picture thinking, equating that dichotomy with culture and nature. It's a conceptual leap that doesn't stick its landing.

Peace King Mother Nature
At: Second Gallery, 516 E. 2nd St., South Boston, through Oct. 15. 617-413-9395. www.secondgallery.org

Polly Apfelbaum: Flags of Revolt and Defiance and Edward Burtynsky: China
At: Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St., through Oct. 18. 617-262-4490. www.barbarakrakowgallery.com

Candice Smith Corby: Recent Work and Magalie Guerin: Unrequited
At: Miller Block Gallery, 14 Newbury St., through Oct. 17. 617-536-4650. www.millerblockgallery.com

Edward Burtynsky's gorgeous photographs of China's industrial and economic growing pains, at Barbara Krakow Gallery, beautifully encompass the big picture and the tiny details. The photos, in both color and black and white, unfailingly convey an almost eternal sense of breadth. Yet they offer up particulars that put the lie to the optimism conveyed by that expansiveness.

Look at the unnerving ``Urban Renewal #5, City Overview from Top of Military Hospital. Shanghai, China." It centers on a few rows of decrepit three- and four-story houses. They're surrounded by dozens of skyscrapers, thrusting into the Shanghai skyline like aggressive weeds, and reaching miles back into the smog. Someone has draped a bright pink towel on the balcony rail of one of the nearby high-rises -- it's a tender humanizing note amid a building boom in which concrete and steel seem to be overtaking humanity.

Also at Krakow, Polly Apfelbaum's print project ``Flags of Revolt and Defiance" captures the banners of rebels, from the pirates' jolly roger to the loose script of Poland's Solidarity movement, and tailors them into stylized flowers. Solidarity, for instance, runs vertically up a white blossom, cut off by the curves at top and bottom. The Black Panthers' logo is cut up by and contained within the blooms.

The result is fun to look at, but conceptually foggy. Apfelbaum layers elements of design just to see what happens. The flowers defang the rebel flags. But so does assembling 30 of them in one place and making them an object of study. They're still boldly graphic, but their original meaning has been watered down, and the artist walks away from an opportunity to utilize their power.

Feminine identity is the hot topic at Miller Block Gallery. Candice Smith Corby's watercolors and wall collage of tottering stacks of furniture suggest precariously constructed situations, filled with social niceties, that are bound to tumble. The wall piece ``Behind My Back Whisper " is a technical feat: She's cut out a divan and Victorian-era chairs from canvas and stuck them to the wall with beeswax. She could come in at any time and rearrange it all.

Corby, who is in her early 30s, is a skilled artist, and her paintings are fanciful and pleasing. But the concept behind her ``Imposter Series," about the various facades women maintain, feels like a throwback to the 1970s. ``A Good Wife (From the Imposter Series)" shows a woman with a George Washington-style do, strewn with ribbons covered in text: ``is always pleasant," ``takes his name," ``holds her tongue." It will be interesting to see what Corby does when she stops examining facades and gets to the meaty inside of her art.

Magalie Guerin, who is also in her early 30s, does that in her ballpoint drawings, also at Miller Block. With their references to Victorian costume and wallpaper patterns, they make a nice match with Corby's work, but they have a darker, psychosexual edge that fits the Victorian theme.

The bespectacled, sour-pussed Guerin is a character throughout. In the comical ``Lovers (sometimes)," she appears with a man, both with giant heads and tiny bodies -- too much thinking, not enough touching. Guerin is an expert draughtsman, and her drawings are both haunting and tart.