Minimalist touch makes the most of everyday materials

In Tara Donovan's art, you can see the democratic impulse and willingness to make any material a work of art that characterize Pop Art and Dada. There are also the obsessively repetitive gestures that have been in vogue during the last decade. Then, surprising amid the rest, there's a nod to Minimalism.

Donovan's smart and surprisingly beautiful show at the Barbara Krakow Gallery features two cunning and magical sculptures and several drawings, which are fun but come across as mere finger exercises beside their three-dimensional counterparts.

For the drawings, Donovan gathers rubber bands in a wooden box, makes a pattern of the elastics as they curl and nudge into one another, then inks them and applies a sheet of paper. The results look like a convention hall packed with skinny paramecia, their bloated heads and tails flicking this way and that in patterns across the page. The accumulation of gestures makes a fluid, engaging whole.

That accretion, from the tiny individual to the much larger whole, makes Donovan's sculptures nuanced and absorbing. "Untitled (Pins)" is a Minimalist-style cube sitting squat on the floor, 42 inches high, made up of thousands of tiny straight pins. The artist sprinkled the pins into a frame that held a smaller wooden cube inside it. She removed the frame, and the pins, locked together in a spiny tangle, held in place. Light plays over the piece in slivers, as elusive as sunlight on water, imbuing the stolid geometry of the cube with a stirring mysticism.

"Moire" features 15 spools of adding- machine paper, each ridiculously large at about a meter in diameter. They lie in a heap on the floor, one stretching, opening and undulating over the next, creating a winking moiré effect. Who knew office supplies could be so lovely?

Tara Donovan: Drawings & Sculpture
At: Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St., through Nov. 29. 617-262-4490, barbarakrakowgallery.com

Squeak Carnwath: Off the Record
At: Nielsen Gallery, 179 Newbury St., through Nov. 25. 617-266-4835, nielsengallery.com

Rebecca Morris: Straight to Hell
At: Samson Projects, 450 Harrison Ave., through Nov. 25. 617-357-7177, samsonprojects.com

Squeak Carnwath's diaristic paintings at Nielsen Gallery plumb the artist's psyche using paint and language. They recall Jean Michel Basquiat's amalgams of graffiti-style hieroglyphs and scrawled text. Carnwath's musings ponder the nature of perception and reality and view painting as a metaphor for life.

The text, which she often offers on lined paper affixed to the canvas, can be charming but also aphoristic and psychoanalytically glib. "Freud sez: 'When you think of me, think of Rembrandt. A little light & a lot of darkness.' " Her humor is too sweet; she explains away rawness , rather than letting it speak its truth.

Carnwath's painting, on the other hand, is engrossing. She covers her panels in layers of oil and alkyd , building up a scuffed but often luminous surface. She scratches and digs into it, smudges it up, draws over it, and more.

"The Whole World" features a multicolored brick-wall grid at the top and a looser, larger patchwork of blocks at the bottom. Erasures, scribbles, and drips play along with images: the black disks of LPs, a palm print, Wedgewood vases, and several pictures of a scruffy-looking man wearing a laurel wreath. A tree stump drawn in spare green right in the center looks ghostly, yet anchors everything else. Ultimately, the paintings add up to more than a woman working the kinks out of her ordinarily troubled soul. The text is merely a note in a bottle floating over the paintings' grittier and more mysterious depths.

Rebecca Morris is a disciple of abstraction, quoting and twitting her forebears, sometimes to great effect in her show at Samson Projects. One untitled work -- a small triangular canvas -- recalls Frank Stella 's black paintings. This one's a cloud of choking coal gray. Stella's works were monumental; Morris's probably stands 18 inches tall, and it's defiantly rimmed with juicy tones -- turquoise, yellow, lavender -- that drip down the edges. No monument, and it's pretty, to boot. An untitled collage sports shards of cardboard, each speckled-over like a Pollock painting -- only the collage is tiny and broken up, and its colors are girlie pinks and purples. They float over a watercolor wash of glowing peach.

Not all of this artist's works are jewel-like or subversively pretty. Morris's strength is in the way she shuffles textures. Two untitled canvases feature jagged networks of intersecting lines, some applied with hazy spray paint, others in glossy, caked streaks of oil paint. One of these is almost all in shades of brown, save for a single thread of neon orange zapping through all the painterly bravado like a lightning bolt. In the other, silvery passages of paint partially fill in spaces between the lines, making a steely counterpoint to the soaking, blurred quality of the network.

There's a sense, in works like the last, that Morris has a lexicon of images, textures, and references that she hasn't quite integrated. The tensions are intriguing, but it's not enough to simply create contrasts. Look at a small, circular work in which moody splatter painting is interrupted by a bold zigzag of thick gold paint. It's just the beginning of a story: Opposites meet. What happens next?