To turn shovel designs into fanciful images, artist digs deep

A detail from ''Die for Grass Slicer'' by Heather Hobler.

EASTON - An 8-foot shovel known as a telegraph spoon, used to install telephone and telegraph poles, hangs from the ceiling at Cushing-Martin Gallery at Stonehill College. The blade scoops down delicately, as if to pat you on the head. Is it part of some whimsical art installation, meant to have deeper meaning? Or is it just a shovel?

In "Traces of the Past," an exhibition pairing industrial drawings with those of artist Heather Hobler, it's both.

It's hard to apply an art lover's eye to engineering drawings. They have a different purpose from art - they aren't reveries on beauty or statements about the human condition. They just tell you how to build a shovel. At least many of these drawings do.

They come from the Ames True Temper Collection, an archive from one of the oldest and most prosperous shovel-makers in the world, at Stonehill's Industrial History Center. Hobler, a local artist who has a practice of making fanciful and absorbing riffs on found drawings, here works off the shovel designs.

I wonder what an engineer would make of Hobler's drawings, which read like the dreams and yearnings of shovels. Not in a narrative way, but by pulling out and repeating lines so an image expands to a shimmer, or sets to dancing. Her "Ames Junior" sports a series of shovel heads and necks, some with dotted lines leading out like the direction of a gaze. It hangs beside a 1935 drawing of the Western pattern H.B. Scoops Blade, rendered here with parameters for five different sizes.

The 1942 Ames drawing of an Idler Sprocket, a radial item with circles drawn between its seven fingers, sets it beside a long, vise-like device that might also function as a ruler. In Hobler's version, she sets that sprocket spinning, and several vises crisscross it. There's a Rube Goldberg quality to Hobler's works - a sense of industriousness multiplied to the point of madness. Yet they're respectful of their sources.

It's provocative to consider industrial drawings in the same realm as art. The precision and care in mark-making stands up. Although utilitarian, like art they represent something conjured from the mind of a human. Hobler's drawings celebrate her kinship with draftsmen past.

Look of 'Love'
Mexican artist Pedro Bonnin is an unsentimental romantic. His paintings at Arden Gallery examine elusive love and look kindly on human foibles and the bonds of connection. His series "Love Is Blind" has an unfortunately static quality; almost all the works feature people gazing out implacably from behind a table.

Bonnin also has one painting, "Holy Elephant," of a pachyderm; it feels like a welcome add-on, because it shows he doesn't have to hide everyone behind a table. Like all his canvases, "Holy Elephant" is allegorical in a way that verges on coy: The animal, which wears shoes, represents memory; a boy on his back represents the future. An angel stands for hope.

Bonnin paints stylized, flat figures and surrounds them with odd props or puts them in costume. In "The Kissing (Someday My Prince Will Come)," a woman in a crown sits with five men dressed as frogs. One sticks out his tongue. One, with a cigarette in his hand, shifts his eyes toward the woman. The rest just look at us, as if perhaps we can solve this unfortunate version of "The Dating Game."

Extreme views
Of the two group shows now at Bromfield Gallery, "Blow-Up," a juried exhibit of photo-based work chosen by photographer Harvey Stein, is the better. The theme covers explosions, hugely pregnant women, inflatable toys, and weapons, and you'd think that would be all over the place, but because it's all so extreme it hangs together beautifully.

Highlights include Alison Jones's "Karo Elder, Ethiopia," showing a vividly painted Ethiopian holding up a machine gun, and Andy Bloxham's "Beta 19," in which the photographer seems to have caught a man in the act, examining his inflatable doll with a stethoscope in bed. Andy Holzman's "Deluge," a black-and-white photo, illuminates driving rain, looking like a shower of sparks over a boat's prow.

The Boston chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art mounts "A Woman's Place," a throwback of an exhibit. It's not that women's issues don't need to be voiced, but in the last 10 or 20 years, the art world has hardly ignored those issues. It's redundant to make a special show for them.

Still, some of the work is strong. I enjoyed Kelly Kerrigan's painting "An Elaborate Costume Before Dinner Is in Excessively Bad Taste," which equates the broad diameter of a woman's hoop skirt with the dinner table. June August's monotype "Murakami Dress" sets the bustled silhouette of a 19th-century woman in bold blue against a backdrop of the bobbing smiley faces of contemporary artist Takashi Murakami. "A Woman's Place" doesn't have the same meaning it once did, at least in Western countries, and so, unlike "Blow-Up," the show as a whole feels nebulous.