It's all in how things are projected

Andrew Neumann's ''P.C.M.S. #1'' (above) is part of the ''Registered Trademark'' exhibit at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery. Lucy Fradkin's ''He Was a Plumber...'' (below), at the Clark.

Andrew Neumann doesn't want us just to look at his art. He wants us to look at how we look.

In "The Last Picture Show" at the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media, his piece "Projector W/Projections" features a video projection of a projection of a projection. It also sports six small video screens, each showing part of a film projector - lens, spinning reel, film spool, and so on.

Neumann takes apart the magic of film by laying bare the technology, but - bear with me if this begins to sound like counting the angels on the head of a pin - on the screen pictured on the screen within the video projection, there's still a picture, sound, filmic magic. We see footage of a bulldozer edited so the machine speeds jerkily and separates into two like the wings of a butterfly; four quadrants of spinning flowers; close-ups of ceiling corners, with a voiceover intoning "the northwest corner, wall and ceiling" and the like.

Film and video projection can be models for psychological projection. If we examine the apparatus, he suggests, we distance ourselves from the projection. But while there's wit and intellectual engagement to Neumann's pieces, they lack heart. He's more interested in deconstructing than in creating.

Many works here push to dislodge form from content. "Ski/Jump" pairs two screens featuring identical images of skiers and a bungee jumper. On one, Neumann turns the images upside down. I became more interested in watching the opposing movements, like abstract gestures wavering across both screens, than I was in the work's narrative. In "Arc W/Variations," a glowing green line crosses several small monitors, making an abstract whole larger than the sum of its parts.

Neumann touches off a degree of concentration that has nothing to do with what's on his screens and everything to do with how it's presented. It's like playing a child's game, comparing two seemingly identical pictures and ferreting out the differences. A buzz comes with the concentration, but none of the satisfaction of solving the puzzle.

Words and images

Neumann also has work at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, along with Peter Harris. Harris's work has much more aesthetic content, and Neumann's is all about concept. Here, all of Neumann's pieces are text-based, some simply words on panels on the wall, others on video. The wall panel "P.C.M.S. #1" has the words "PARTLY CLOUDY MOSTLY SUNNY" followed by "MOSTLY SUNNY PARTLY CLOUDY" stacked up against a digital photo of a cloud-swept sky. The phrases carry as much visual weight as the image; it reads like a snarky comment on meteorologists as mediators.

Harris offers two bodies of work. Two large-scale prints on aluminum are color-juiced scans of crushed plastic bottles - lush, streaked, and grainy, luminous yet clearly trashy.

His videos of spinning bottle tops also glow; they're translucent, sometimes falling apart bits of nothing - again, garbage, but here stand-ins for the earth. Each video plays in an old TV monitor. Each, too, has a comical listening tube, a black plastic protuberance that you hold to your ear. These vary from sappy organ music to a woman chanting phonetics to throbbing white noise. They're interesting, but don't do much for the videos.

Patterns and phrases

Lucy Fradkin's paper-doll-like portraits at Clark Gallery appear simple, but they're packed with personality. Her images of black people - her Jamaican husband, Arthur Simms, or her Brooklyn neighbors in the brilliant "He Was a Plumber, an Electrician, a Carpenter, a Cabinetmaker, a Tiler, a Blacksmith and a Mechanic," featuring a family posing against a red backdrop - pop off the wall. The other images, all of prim white women, look wan and apologetic in comparison.

It has to do with skin tone and color contrasts; in these works, the darker skin plays joyfully off bright backgrounds. Then Fradkin adds in wild patterns - in "He Was a Plumber. . .," we see a green summer dress and intricately patterned necklace, a pink dress with white polka dots, a wood-tiled floor. The work becomes almost musical, with filigrees and whispers and hot tones swirling around the straight-backed figures.

Sharon Kaitz's "Mothers in Arms" series of paintings, also at Clark, tackles a topic loaded with sentiment - the mothers of children who go off to war. She scrawls, in red or blue paint, a mother's wishes over grounds choked with texture and running paint. These range from the unfortunately mawkish "don't forget to wear your helmet" to the on-point, "It will end in tears," in which Kaitz subverts sentimentality by invoking the scolding tone of a mother - "Stop what you're doing to your little sister right now, or it will end in tears" - and makes the issue more nuanced.