A pop icon's many layered image

Twenty years ago, Jeff Koons made a ceramic sculpture in glittering gold and white, "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," depicting the singer with his pet chimp in his lap. Koons was working in the celebrity-addled tradition of Andy Warhol, examining and toying with the intoxicating sheen of fame.

Ben Sloat's entire exhibit at OH+T Gallery plays with Michael Jackson's image. Two decades on, though, Jackson's iconography has changed. He has become a weird and disturbing figure in the eyes of the public, an atrophied relic of who he was at the height of his fame. Sloat has always specialized in examining the superficial signifiers of identity - ethnicity, gender, costume. In this clever, funny, and at times unnerving exhibit, he deploys a range of media to explore how deep the surface of one icon can be, and at what point it caves in.

He giddily resurrects the Jackson of "Thriller," memorializing that spark of glory as if the singer were Christ in "Thrill Me," a stained glass window mounted on a light box. He riffs on Koons with a series of small statues patterned on "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," including "Elvis and Ringo," with Jackson as Presley with Ringo Starr in his lap.

But these feel like a mere game of pop culture Twister beside the strongest piece here, the painting "Seductive Whiteness." Like many of Sloat's earlier works, the painting is a composite, pulling together elements of different canvases by the romantic 19th-century French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In it, fluttering cherubs attend a Christ-like, nearly naked Jackson. Where they touch him, his skin whitens.

Here, Sloat digs deep into all that Jackson's image has come to signify since his heyday - the erasure of his race; his alleged predilection for young boys; an archetype that compasses victim, martyr, king, and boy. The painting itself is gauzy and sweet, but it's not at all a pretty picture.

"In Between: The Cultural DMZ" kicks off a series of exhibits at Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College taking a look at a cultural demilitarized zone - meaning the shifts and distinctions among things we used to read more rigidly. In the case of this first show, which features art by Sloat and Dorothy Imagire, the topic is ethnicity.

Sloat uses the classic format of the scroll, referencing Japanese ukiyo-e prints, to present works that challenge notions of what it means to be Asian, or for that matter, American. In the series "Seven Little Ladies," Sloat takes vintage shampoo bottles, each with a little girl's head, and offers us a host of ethnicities - brown skin, yellow skin, pink skin. Pouty-lipped and set against a shower curtain, these little ladies all have a geisha quality to them, as if beckoning us to the bath, yet they're also eerily childlike.

Imagire plumbed her mixed-race heritage back in the early 1990s, when it seemed everyone in the art world was claiming and trumpeting his or her ethnic identity. For Imagire, who is part Japanese, part Iranian, it was more complicated. She has a series of elegant and funny kimonos she made then, such as "Kevin's Identity Garment," that clearly sport traditional textiles from more than one culture - in Kevin's case, Japan and Africa.

Both artists probe what it means to be of mixed race, and how to manage that in a society that can still label a person with dark skin as "other."

Miller Block Gallery opens in its new space at 38 Newbury St. with a sprightly, engaging exhibit of political campaign buttons, each designed by a local artist. Some are real works of art; others are clever visual jokes; still others are smart graphic designs that the candidates might consider utilizing. Sloat appears here, too, with a Michael Jackson button.

Doug Bolin riffs on Renaissance-era paintings of the Madonna and child, offering one button with Hillary Clinton suckling Barack Obama, and another with Sarah Palin suckling John McCain. C.E. Kaplan's button uses accordion-folded paper to depict the United States as red or blue, depending on how you look at it. The exhibit, unsurprisingly packed with Obama supporters, is fun because it's so topical, accessible, and generally clever.

Ken Beck's new show at Gallery NAGA is a landscape show, which is an unexpected turn for Beck, and not an entirely successful one. Beck is most effective when melding landscape with portraiture, finding faces in tree burls and stretches of rock: His portraits, as always, are riveting.