Portrait of the artist as a gender-blender

Androgyny has a tradition, in art, of being presented as transgressive. Manet painted a come-hither woman in toreador pants. Duchamp developed a female alter ego. Nan Goldin photographed drag queens in makeup, but unclad. All daring and, to varying degrees, discomfiting, because, let's face it, most of us like our categories, and gender is a very reliable way to categorize people.

Hannah Barrett has been painting androgynous figures since 2000, but there's nothing in-your-face about her portraits, which are deadpan and endearing. In the past, she has mixed together parts of her parents to create odd characters that in some way amounted to self-portraits. She similarly jumbled a married couple who were genetic scientists. Then she lighted on the portraits of couples by John Singleton Copley, and combined the figures into one.

In her new show, "The Secret Society," at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Barrett dives into 19th-century photos from the Library of Congress archives. She has let go the conceptual underpinnings of genetics and marriage in order to widen her net, drawing noses, mouths, eyes, and bodies from multiple sources, always conflating male with female. With a larger palette of features to work with, Barrett makes characters who are even livelier and more compelling than those in previous work.

They all sit primly, in their best outfits, posing for the camera. The outfits alone offer a comic commentary on gender in 19th-century fashion. "Dame Critchley-Midgeley" wears a doublet that looks military, with brass buttons and epaulets over a voluminous skirt. A tightly curled bouffant perches over a beefy face. "Lord Wagstaff" looks a bit like Buster Brown, in a modified, feminine sailor suit and long hair, swept back from a receding hairline and long, mournful face.

These are delightful, funny paintings, but despite different tactics, Barrett seems to be mining the same material. I don't think she should abandon androgyny. Rather, a couple of paintings here with more context - such as the craggily handsome "Demoiselle Blackheath" standing dockside - point her in a new direction, away from formal portraiture and toward narrative. To see these people as actors on their own stages, rather than stiffly posed for scrutiny, would open them up even more.

Hannah Barrett: The Secret Society
At: Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury St., through Oct. 30. 617-262-0550. howardyezerskigallery.com

Candice Ivy: Black Tide
At: Laconia Gallery, 433 Harrison Ave., through Nov. 17. 617-670-1568. laconiagallery.org

Frances Hamilton: Annisquam Series
Gary Nisbet: Travel Home
At: Clark Gallery, 145 Lincoln Road, Lincoln, through Nov. 1. 781-259-8303. clarkgallery.com

Southern Gothic

Two large-scale drawings preface "Black Tide," Candice Ivy's brooding, evocative video installation at Laconia Gallery. Ivy is a Southerner who takes the American South and its history and culture as her theme. The drawings, abstracted landscapes, portray tangled swampland and dark, deep abysses; they're places you cannot walk through without getting sucked in, perhaps fatally.

Ivy projects her three-channel video on three walls that seem to open to embrace a visitor who steps into the darkened gallery. The videos are all in black and white, and they run repetitively in a loop, making for a ghostly, grinding, ruminative experience. The two on either side show farmland rushing past, as through a train window; the furrowed fields fan quickly by, with a result that verges on a hypnotic, moire effect.

Couched between them, the third video focuses on a pit bull inside a gated fence. Laconic, shirtless young men congregate behind the dog. They don't engage the camera, but the lunging, snarling, barking dog seems often about to swallow the lens, and us with it. His wet, gaping maw recalls the swamp in the drawings. The audio, a low rumble with occasional train whistles, does not include the dog's growls, so while threatening, he's more dreamlike and metaphoric, an implicit threat chasing you that you can't shrug off. Ivy's South has the trapped, gorgeous, sprawling feel of a Faulkner novel. I wonder what she would do with the North.

Sentimental and sweet

There's a bit too much sentimentality and not enough edge to a two-person show at Clark Gallery. Frances Hamilton's paintings of the Brynmere, an inn in Annisquam where her family has vacationed for 15 years, strive to capture that suspended-in-time feeling of a long, carefree summer day in a beautiful place.

They glow with warm sunlight and polished wood. The rooms are empty and sparkling, yet that emptiness has no ache to it; the paintings feel more like an ad for the inn than essays in a record of the artist's experience. Hamilton used to work in collage, and the most intriguing moments in these paintings come when she reprises that form: Tiny bits of cloth representing coverlets and upholstery (as in the floral cushion and turquoise seat in "Chaise Lounge") add buzz and texture to this otherwise lulling body of work.

Gary Nisbet's overly folksy mixed-media collages seem made to please. In "History of Architecture" he stacks four square panels and paints a Greek column rising over them. The paint roils and drips darkly at the bottom; with each panel, the image gets more crisp. Each has a diagram or text about Greek architecture tacked onto the center, and something sweet painted over that: a cupcake, an ice cream cone.

Nisbet's use of paint, pattern, and collage is expert. Did he really have to put the cherry on top?