Crafty gauges of daily phenomena

Sculptor 's baskets carry data about weather patterns

Nathalie Miebach's "Barometric Pressure: Herring Cove, Cape Cod" presents meteorological information on a basket with grids.

Sculptor and meteorology geek Nathalie Miebach brings her two passions together in her art. She makes sculptures that chart data about precipitation, tides, daylight hours, and phases of the moon. "Changing Weather," her exhibit at Nielsen Gallery, gathers such information from Maine and Provincetown, where she's been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center for the last two years.

Miebach doesn't preach about or politicize weather patterns. She observes them and makes art out of them, and with so much keen attention being paid to climate change, her interest is timely. She maps most of her data with little dowels, flags, and wooden balls on grids she makes of woven reeds - that is, baskets. For this show, she also added a couple of wall-mounted pinwheels that the viewer can spin.

The works, in a palette of bold colors, enchant in more than one way: They convey information about weather, which we all deal with daily, in a format that ties the ancient craft of basketry to present-day construction toys.

Miebach's real challenge is in getting all that data to work for her aesthetically. Sometimes it coalesces, and sometimes it overwhelms. Miebach gives each classification of data a different symbol, and all the flags, balls, and networks of crisscrossing reeds and dowels can be too much to read. It's a challenge to orchestrate all that information into an elegant form.

"Barometric Pressure: Herring Cove, Cape Cod" starts out solidly enough, with a red basket base, but the more you pay attention to which dowel denotes wind speed and which indicates air temperature, the more cluttered and confusing the basket's contents become.

The baskets entice with their often undulating shapes, and when Miebach evenly distributes her data around a central woven form, her work is most aesthetically effective.

"Temporal Warmth: Tango Between Air, Land, and Sea," a central vortex with a net of blue dowels charting the air stream around it, looks like a terrifying roller coaster ride. It evokes the swell and fall of waves and the moving, organic force of weather patterns. This piece doesn't simply boggle our minds with information or please (or baffle) us with a complex structure. It actually conjures the weather.

Uncomfortable beauty

Painter Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz does not make easy art. She takes violence as her subject, and her works, painted on dyed, often crumbling plaster supports, are unnerving and strangely beautiful. For the artist's new show at Howard Yezerski Gallery, she has gathered images from around the world and across decades to use as source material, frequently combining several incidents into one searing image.

Look at "Moscow, Vietnam, Shanksville." A man thrown from the Moscow subway bomb blast in 2004 sprawls in the foreground, his form bright with color - blue shirt, bloody chest, glowing on the green grass. Beyond him, the air fills with smoke from a pit in the ground, a 9/11 image from Shanksville, Pa. In the center of the painting, a post flanked with barbed wire stakes out a militarized zone in Vietnam.

Spatz-Rabinowitz renders these images with chilling clarity, although in most of the paintings they arise out of smoking backgrounds that are lovingly rendered; the artist, while playing witness, can't help but also make something beautiful and painterly.

"Burning Heap, Blue Sky" is simpler than "Moscow, Vietnam, Shanksville," perhaps because there are no limp bodies in the scene. Crumpled, charred steel and glowing spots of fire anchor the painting. Concrete blocks and tiny flames fly through the air like confetti, all against the background of a soft blue sky. But the sky is painted on cracked, chipping plaster - in this artist's world, even the underpinnings of the sky are disintegrating. And as these paintings strongly point out, it's not just that the sky is falling. It's that we've become so inured to it - to the images on the news - it's almost as if it doesn't matter anymore. Spaz-Rabinowitz reminds us that it does.

Fleeting glimpses

The photographer Dawoud Bey has organized "Are We There Yet?," a photo-based group show at GASP that is less about road trips than it is about transience, boundaries, and living in an increasingly unrooted society. While the topic is too big and ambitious for such a small space, Bey has brought in some lovely work, and some work that seems too familiar - particularly the immigration-themed photos of Surendra Lawoti and Nahna Kim.

Rula Halawani's understated and strong series of black-and-white photos of soldiers and travelers passing through a West Bank checkpoint focuses exclusively on their hands - the exchange of papers, gesticulations. Alan Cohen's stunningly textured, intimate black-and-white shots in the series "Lines of Authority (Panama Canal Zone)" home in on the border site where Panamanian students challenged the US Marines in 1964: All we see in Cohen's photos are nylon fencing, pebbles, and concrete, yet they seem charged with history.

Aron Gent's poignant color photos of his family at their summer lake house follow his aunt, who has Down syndrome. She's a stolid, sad figure among her young adult nieces and nephews; time appears to be moving past her.