This painter uses an expansive palette

Andrea Myers considers herself a painter. You might not know it wandering through her show at Steven Zevitas Gallery. You'll see ripped stacks of paper and fabric collages on the wall, piles of fabric on the floor and on a pedestal, but nothing you might immediately think of as a painting. That's Myers's point. The Chicago artist intends to push at the edges of painting's definition. Sometimes she does that with wit and daring, and sometimes the leap she asks her viewers to take is just too great - but even then, her objects captivate.

The layered paper, into which she has torn holes, works best to achieve her aim. She presents these pieces squarely on the wall, and although they're mostly white (or in one case, black), she has inked some of the interior strata; we see their edges, in a variety of colors, and some jut prominently into or even fill the gaps she creates.

In the series "Unearthing," the result is geological, as if we're looking into a sinkhole or a chasm. It's white, shot with bright color. If this were a standard oil-on-canvas painting, it would be, perhaps, a picture of an abyss. With the layered paper, Myers works directly in three-dimensional space, rather than creating an illusion of it.

With the fabric collages, such as "Ebb," which looks like a construction of giant twist-ties, colorful and cinched at the middle, there's the suggestion that perhaps Myers has taken a painting, ripped it to shreds, and sewn it back together in a more sculptural form. The sculpture "Shift," made out of layers of inked fabric glued together, whispers that it might have once been a painting. Yet it engages more because of its undulant finished form and the sense of the slow accretion of its making.

"Rift," the largest and most playful work in the show, is two halves of a large white box, each stuffed with layers of colorful fabric. The box looks torn open, as if the sterile unit has unexpectedly revealed its passionate interior. Brilliant tones reference painting, but this work's outside/inside tension is purely sculptural. Myers makes painting and its definitions her benchmark, but what she does with her slow-burn technique of accrual or removal is as compelling as her philosophical parameters, and it works in sculpture, too.

Two Texas artists have a show at Kidder Smith Gallery and fit well into that gallery's big, bright, lush aesthetic. John Hartley paints large-scale visions of old toys and collectibles. The best of them dazzle, as he showcases beat-up figurines with the paint chipping off. In "Portrait of an Indian Chief No. 5" the interplay between the sharp-edged shards of paint and the dull glow of the bare metal beneath obscures the figure's face and calls attention to his bright headdress and shirt. It turns the familiar icon into something more abstract and conceptually nuanced.

Other images, such as "Trigger and Roy," a painting of a figurine of celebrity cowboy Roy Rogers on his horse, while artfully made, plug right into a vein of nostalgia clotted with sentimentality.

Realist painter Daniel Blagg portrays a declining urban landscape in well-made pictures - of a dive bar, a drive-in, a pay phone, all long out of use. The message of decay is depressingly the same. A couple of paintings escape the lockstep of despair. In "Bus Stop," a woman stands on a street corner beneath a crazy sign of a man made from jagged red lines. This feels more like a provocative short story into which we can read what we like, unlike the one-note elegies for a dying way of life.

"Now & Then" is a graceful group show featuring the stable at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, which specializes in both contemporary art and historical drawings. The juxtapositions delight - Kelly Spalding, who paints on old dish towels, has her untitled painting of vertical stripes hanging beside a textile design of overlapping grids from Atelier Arthur Litt, circa 1935.

Sharon Horvath's organic mixed media works show intricately networked blobs; she has said they're based on trees. Next to them, we see a 17th-century watercolor and black chalk drawing from Germany, "Studies of Morel mushrooms (Morchella esculenta)", and the looping design on the skin of the mushroom caps looks eerily similar to Horvath's blobs. She'd never seen the drawing when she made hers.

A series of 19th-century French ink and watercolor renderings of snakes making their exquisite S-curves lead to Todd McKie's "Wild Kingdom," a white-pencil-on-black-paper drawing with a snake baring its fangs looping down the center. McKie's work is comic, angular, stylized, and even simple compared to the French drawings; even so, you can't miss a delightful formal kinship. There are more than 60 works in this show, which isn't out to prove anything; it's just a playground for the viewer's imagination.