From ordinary to the sublime

Abstraction and utility collide in the work of John Beech . The artist, who has a clever and provocative show up at Howard Yezerski Gallery , is best known for making sculptures that look as if they ought to function. Here his "Dumpster Drawings" feature one or more black-and-white photos of a dumpster.

What could be more mundane and useful than a dumpster? Beech coats each dumpster image with enamel paint, sometimes carving out the awkward shape with flat color and leaving the rest of the photo untouched, sometimes coating much of the photograph. The enamel interacts with the photographic chemicals, creating a soft gold aura around the paint.

There's a lot to look at here. A flat block of colored paint interrupts and defies the illusionistic reality of the photograph, asserting a minimalist painting aesthetic. The paint's surface reveals drips and puckering networks. Yet the photograph surrounding or glimpsed beneath the painting still pulls you in. The diptych "Dumpster Drawing #154 (Sage Green)" has a dumpster behind a chain-link fence in the top image; Beech paints over the dumpster, but not the fence, creating a delicious tension between the painting's surface and the photo's foreground.

Beech loves the ugly forms of items such as dumpsters, built for function and not beauty. He compels us to look at stuff we usually ignore. His "Turning Object" series features three sculptures he fashioned from plaster casts of the insides of old plastic containers.

"Turning Object #47" has as its base what looks like half the inside of a flowerpot, topped with the cast interior of a shallow bowl. Blue, pink, and red paint drips over the white plaster, and you're invited to set the top spinning. It has a charming, middle-school-art-project appeal, affirmed by the invitation to touch. Beech isn't just massaging utilitarian objects into works of art; like the Dadaists and Pop artists before him, he punctures the hallowed idea of beauty and what belongs in a gallery.

John Beech: New Work: Sculpture & Drawings
At: Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury St., through Nov. 14. 617-262-0550, howardyezerskigallery.com

Tabitha Vevers: Distant Shores: The Shell Series
At: Pepper Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Nov. 11. 617-236-4497, peppergalleryboston.com

Charles Jones: Terrae Incognitae and Laura Evans: Seeing Red
At: Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., through Nov. 11.

617-482-7781, bostonsculptors.com

Tabitha Vevers is all about beauty. She paints in oil and gold leaf on the inside of shells, making precious and mysterious objects of contemplation. She draws on Japanese traditions such as Kai-awase (12th -century painted shells) and Shunga (17th - to 19th -century erotic woodblock prints).

Vevers has long dealt with sexuality in her paintings, and most of the works here capture women in the embrace of sea creatures along the shore, that mythological meeting place of the conscious mind and the unconscious. Images such as "Embrace," in which a giant squid wraps its tentacles around a woman, are erotic and shocking. The gold leaf in the background recalls altarpieces. The shells suggest that you could cup these stories in your hand. They follow a story line of loss and sexual abandon as the route to self-discovery.

They aren't all sexual. In "The Stolen Child," an infant curls against the belly of a placid sheep sitting near the ocean. The elegantly composed "Plenty" shows a boy lolling in a boat loaded with fish. Vevers painted many of these pieces during a fellowship in Ireland. Irish folklore, steeped in the culture's relationship with the sea, shines through these moody, rapturous works.

Charles Jones and Laura Evans have put together an odd pair of solo shows at the Boston Sculptors Gallery . Jones makes dark works that dip into history and epic subjects such as the drive to conquer. Evans makes bright, comic sculptures, all based on the intimate physical confines and challenges presented in her studio. Each is strong, but they don't fit together well.

Jones's compelling "Oar of Cortes" series takes off on the boat that Hernando Cortes , the Spanish conquistador, rowed from his ship to the shore of Mexico. Each oar is outfitted with a tool with which to conquer. "Oar of Cortes, Cruz," for instance, has a crucifix at the handle end of the fire-blackened ash oar. "Oar of Cortes, Caballa de Oro" features the skull of a horse. The artist also makes an eerie tie between totems of Mayan and Aztec civilization and the present in "Filter," in which old masks appear to open to reveal a present-day gas mask, frightening in illuminated red glass.

Evans moved into a new studio recently and discovered leaking pipes, meandering wires, drips, and bulbous outlets. These inspired her to make sculptures that poetically elucidate the parts of our environments we'd rather ignore, using bright red fabric as a sort of flag. "Bulging is Normal" has a pipe rising from the floor; first it's wrapped in an Ace bandage, then it tops out in a red ring of a pillow that looks like lips. The sexual tone twists the sweating pipes and dripping walls into something almost human, and turns what sounds like a nightmarish working environment into something endearing.