More equal than others

Annette Lemieux keeps things down on the farm for her terrific exhibit at Barbara Krakow Gallery, which plays off tropes that spring from agriculture. She makes George Orwell's "Animal Farm" a counterpoint to "lipstick on a pig." She deploys references to hay, gingham, and cows. She paints one piece, a barn-like doghouse, with milk paint, traditionally used to cover barns.

Lemieux excels at identifying patterns as straightforward as a paisley used in clothes sold at the Gap in the 1970s, or significantly subtler material - such as an image that arises again and again through history, each time loaded with meaning from the past but tweaked to fit the present.

Take the humble pig. The chilling and funny "Wanted" features a black-and-white silkscreen of a pig lumbering toward us. Text turns it into a wanted poster, seeking Snowball "for crimes against the farm." Snowball was Orwell's porcine hero, a champion of all animals, overthrown by a despotic hog. "Act responsibly and contact the nearest doghouse," the poster advises.

The very same image, minus the text and plus a pink kiss plastered on its snout, hangs across the gallery as "Pig With Lipstick." What does our 2008 prettied-up pig have to do with Orwell's Snowball? Both conjure politics, leadership, and shaping a message to sway the masses. Throw in "For Sale By Owner," the milk-painted doghouse Lemieux made from a kit, and the associations run fast and thick. The doghouse recalls the overzealous canine security force in "Animal Farm," but here it's empty and for sale, which ties it into today's sliding real estate market.

Her installation "Got Plaid? Got Polka Dot? Got Paisley?" delves into sales and packaging strategies, nodding to Andy Warhol. Three patterned boxes sit in front of a wall covered with peeling red barn wood. The plaid box echoes a tartan used by Amnesty International, according to gallery director Andrew Witkin. Lemieux borrows the red, yellow, and blue polka dot pattern from Wonder Bread, and the paisley from early clothes at the original Gap store in San Francisco. Is the barn wall behind them any less a brand, signifying an intrinsic piece of American history and culture?

Lemieux shows how images, patterns, and idioms metastasize through time, taking on bigger, sometimes more caricatured, meanings. Her materials - wood, ink, paint - are merely tools she uses to convey the far more slippery stuff she builds her work with: society's projections of who we are and what we want.

Dexter Lazenby's sculptures used to be monolithic and pale. In his new show at Nielsen Gallery, most of them are segmented like spines and painted with ravishing tones. He's gone from ponderous to playful. The electric blue "Bend" is a curving column made out of almond-shaped segments. A carved notch runs down one side; a congruent hump runs down the other. A hole in the second block up glints with a paler blue. Lazenby's painterly surface buzzes with brush strokes, suggesting translucence. The tone is so brilliant it quivers with energy; "Bend" seems almost alive, and in places vaporous - quite a trick for a sculpture.

It's been a wild ride for painter Jon Imber, who back in the 1980s painted intricately composed figures. Now, his paintings (also up at Nielsen) are voluptuously expressionistic. His still lifes (hardly still!) and landscapes are much more abstract than the figures were. This change in style has been a joy to watch evolve, but sadly, in at least half of the works in this new show, Imber seems to have lost his compass.

The large paintings, in particular, are so exuberantly gestural it's as if he's ceded any sense of composition and balance to the sheer joy of messing with paint. They feel overwhelming and uncontained, like a ticker tape parade.

"Tiger Lily and Sunflower" is an exception. The lily and the sunflower seem to explode like fireworks around a central glowing blot of yellow-gold. In smaller canvases, such as "Blueberries and Cream," with its luscious dollops of paint, the size works as a counterpoint to the unfettered paint application.

The Korean-born photographer Eunjoo Lee was raised with certain strictures around what it meant to be a good girl. One of them was to avoid nudity. In her black-and-white images, she approaches the body in terms of form and function: hands grasp, point, or push; feet walk. Her models are unclothed, working in pairs, and Lee fractures the figures so that they read almost abstractly. In "Hand Grasping Elbow," for instance, a man's dark hand grabs the elbow of a pale-skinned woman, trisecting the space into triangles.

Issues of race, sex, and power are barely held in by all that formalism. For instance, "Head and Foot" shows a woman's light-skinned heel against the bald forehead of a black man. It's a composition of tones, textures, and shapes - and it evokes centuries of oppression. It's not clear whether that is the artist's intent. No matter. It usually works.