Woodworks hammer home a spare poetry

At Samson Projects, sculptures by Taylor Davis present a challenge

Above: In ''after before'' by Taylor Davis, the box spins around the log on top of the bottom pieces. (Courtesy Samson Projects)

Taylor Davis's sculptures can sometimes resist understanding. Her new show at Samson Projects, "N W rk Ab t," has a title as flummoxing as her work; she has removed the vowels from "No Work About," which is confusing even with the vowels.

Most of her sculptures are spare wooden things; there are several boxes in the current show. The key to approaching them is patience, as the artist acknowledges. "This work is very new. It takes time for me to understand," she says in an artist's statement, which goes on to helpfully annotate each piece. The time is usually worth it, like the effort spent getting to know someone initially shy but ultimately deep and surprising.

Look at "after before," a beaver-chewed black-locust log standing in a bottomless plywood box, which rests on two more pieces of plywood. I walked around it, scrutinized it: my mind shuffling through possible meanings: There's a nature-versus-culture dichotomy between log and box, there's a bit of a phallic sense to the log. All true, but not stirring, not a way in.

Then Samson Projects's owner Camilo Alvarez showed me that the two base pieces form a turntable, and the box spins around the log. "Figure and ground attached with context turning around it," Davis writes of the piece, using lingo more often associated with painting than sculpture. It was thrilling to see. The space seemed to change around the imperfectly vertical log; the log's concentric rings looked dizzying, even though they weren't turning.

There's a poetry to this artist's simple forms. The tightly crossed oak boards forming the base of a nearly erect iron rod in "prop 1976" come across as unyielding or unforgiving; consequently, the dark rod seems spurned, awkward, even ashamed, like the child of closed-off parents. Davis's precise use of form is keenly minimalist, but it often evokes dark emotions, and the mixed sense of hiding and exposure.

Not all the works are sculptural. The photo "really good painter," of a tear-off flier for a painter upon which Davis has scrawled her imprimatur and someone else has drawn an arrow to her name and written "and anything [Davis] says goes," is a trifle, a goof on herself and what clout she wields. A pair of dungarees with a large grommet to the left of the fly, "bigboybaby" makes a phallic reference far more visceral than the one in "after before." It's fun, but it, too, comes across as a throwaway next to her mostly wooden sculptures, with their scruffy grace and a reserve that masks surprisingly high-voltage undercurrents.

Schoolboy days

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Duncan Hannah used to socialize with Andy Warhol. He made the glam rock scene and the punk scene. He popped up in movies, modeled, and mounted a painting show with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in an abandoned Times Square massage parlor.

Hannah's paintings at Pierre Menard Gallery make no reference to that existence, but they are nostalgic and intentionally kitschy, which seems fitting. Hannah paints in a style that recalls mid-20th-century British book illustrations. Boys play cricket on a tidy town green in "The Shipwreck Boys in Yorkshire." A strip of a fellow in a white singlet and billowy shorts puts up his dukes in "Flyweight Boxer." Then there are the boys' dreams, captured in paintings of ships, or the roadster in "Grand Prix, 1959," or two canvases depicting rowers skimming past the Harvard boathouse.

Individually, these paintings are too precious, stirring up a sticky sweet nostalgia for a certain kind of boyhood stuck in 1955. As a group, though, they succeed in casting a spell of yearning, hope, and the prospect of heroism that, while a little coy, still feels as if it has its roots in truth and real possibility.

Misty magic

Peter Brooke deftly deploys erasure to create both riveting detail and ethereal fog in his gorgeous landscapes of western Ireland and Vermont at Gallery NAGA. Remarkably, from a distance these oil paintings resemble photographs. Brooke loads them with linseed oil to lend them a glassy surface. Up close, though, they're not realist at all - the brushstrokes, scratches, smudges, and scuffs are brilliantly in evidence.

"Unmarked Pass, Glinsk" looks like a scene from "The Lord of the Rings," with a bowl of a valley holding the mist. In places the reedy grass, scratched out of paint, makes a glowing, brushy surface so delicately textured it nearly has you on the mountain's edge. Gradually, the slopes beyond hush, fading behind the weather into a chalky gray to become dark, lumbering forms. Then there's the mist itself, wafting and billowing through a milky blue sky.

Brooke's ability to evoke minutely concrete landscape and the peculiar qualities of light in moisture toys with our sense of space: A painting can turn quickly from the delightful and grounding particularity of texture to a sense of dissolution in the fog. His landscapes become mirrors of human consciousness, filled with moments of being lost, followed by moments of being found.