Sculptures built with fear and hope

''Where It Lives'' (right) is one of Sally B. Moore's architectural pieces in ''Edge'' at Barbara Krakow Gallery. Kim Salerno's collages (left) are at the Cushing-Martin Gallery in ''Big Miniature: Moving Through a Picture of a Room.''

I visited galleries last week, rattled by news of the economic crisis. The stock market was plummeting again. Listening to the radio, headlines seemed to screech. "Are we approaching another Great Depression?" cried the BBC.

At Barbara Krakow Gallery, I read sculptor Sally B. Moore's artist's statement before I looked closely at her work. It begins: "Wonder and fear coexist. Sometimes, they are intertwined. We must be willing to walk toward both." I exhaled and recalled that it was a beautiful day outside. All was not wrong with the world.

Moore's a good writer and a better sculptor. Her work has always embodied terror, neurosis, and the possibility of salvation. For years, she has built small, splintering, crazy-quilt architectural pieces that carry the sense of everything falling apart, then gamely, even ridiculously, pulling back together.

In this new body of work, "Edge," she boldly introduces the figure into many of her sculptures. Suddenly, her physical metaphors for balance and chaos become stories, fables on the verge of resolution. In her artist's statement, Moore shares her fascination with dreams, and some of the odd dramas she creates come from her dreams.

In "Approaching Eye Level (From Dream Series)," a small clay woman shimmies up a piece of twine hanging from one end of a horizontal rod; a bear in a cage is suspended at the other end. The two counterbalance each other. It's a perfect characterization, although I imagine an inadvertent one, of the frightened response to the bear market and the way we weigh our fear, or sometimes it outweighs us. I had to look twice before I saw a more hopeful element to the piece: The bear cage is seemingly held aloft by a hummingbird.

"Fall" also resonates with the times. It hangs high on the gallery wall, a platform broken through the middle, with a fallen figure deep in the pocket of a safety net below. The most intricate work, "Where It Lives," has no figures; Moore says in her statement that "It" signifies imagination. The piece is classic Moore, but more ambitious than I've seen before: a shelter-like contraption on three uneven legs, with twisting stairways, broken floors, fractured landings, fences, and mesh rooms. The piece seems to spontaneously generate itself: A floor falls through, and a ladder appears. Ramshackle and precarious, "Where It Lives" nonetheless continues to grow, to vault skyward, and to say, "So you're afraid - that's OK, let's see what happens."

Flights of fancy
The three strong artists in "Figment's Imagination" at Miller Block Gallery linger on the cusp between fantasy and reality. Jane D. Marsching's digital prints, some of which she showed at the Institute of Contemporary Art's Foster Prize Show as a finalist for that award two years ago, look like color photographs of the Arctic.

They're not; they come from computer-generated models of the Arctic. Like a set designer, Marsching decides time of day and weather. She also adds players - odd figures doing acrobatics, among other things, referring to the theatrics that 19th-century Arctic explorers staged to help get through the long winter nights. Works such as "Arctic Then: Bonnie and Tim, Columbia Glacier," in which a woman climbs up a man's back along the shore of a gray lake, appear romantically real, but are complete fiction.

Deb Todd Wheeler constructs miniature flying machines out of copper wire and plastic shopping bags; they're grungy but elegant, and based on actual aeronautical designs dating back centuries. They laud the dreamers who to this day try to get up in the air on their own power.

Photographer Tanit Sakakini digitally cobbles together different images she shoots herself. In "Still Life With Cavalli Underwear," she photographed the still life - the titular pink panties on a gingham-covered table with a pitcher of flowers and a plate of cookies. She separately photographed a model, made up to look like a half-woman, half-insect, and placed the tiny figure on the table beside the pitcher, gazing up at a dangling dead leaf. It's a comical, dark piece, echoing the Vanitas theme of mortality that still lifes have traditionally referenced.

Layers and dimensions
Kim Salerno has two collages hanging outside the Cushing-Martin Gallery at Stonehill College, to give a taste of what's to come. She uses bright patterns and familiar domestic fabrics to make work that's visually active, using decorative elements to be slightly provocative. They're sweet, but sweet doesn't amount to much.

Until you get into the gallery, where Salerno has exploded her collage style into three dimensions, filling the space with pattern-covered panels that jut through the air, layering them with hanging, translucent fabrics and colored Plexiglas, carrying lines down onto the floor and sprinkling silhouettes of dogs, people, and a smart car throughout.

It's a jazzy, delightful installation; you feel as if you're actually inside the collage, navigating your way through and under and around its bright jumble of elements. They clamor and clash, but they fit together well enough to invite you to explore.