David Perry Smith Gallery

In David Perry Smith’s “Fresh Horses,” one of this year’s most flawlessly integrated three-person shows, Holly Fisher wields steel like sticks of charcoal and forges strips of metal so fluid, digital images of her work look like contour drawings. We feel muscles rippling throughout the torso of a horse labeled Louie. We see into the cartilage and bones of a skeletal structure that is delicate but strong enough to lock the animal’s slender legs in place as he throws back his head whipping up his mane and tail.

An award-winning equestrian as well as accomplished encaustic painter, Mary Cour Burrows, floats near the top of her Chagall-like self-portrait The Horse Whisperer. Mouth to nostril, Burrows breathes life into a creature whose prominent snout, gentle eyes, and thick fur look like a not quite solidified version of the red mare at the bottom of the painting. In Dancing with the Red Horses, Burrows and four sorrels circle faster and faster until their fully extended bodies move in an unbroken circle — hand to tail to hoof to mane — that brings to mind the primal joy of the nude figures in Matisse’s masterwork La Danse.

In Mary Reed’s haunting collage painting Pause Prance, a woman both rides on and merges with a translucent steed created out of layers of handmade paper and white-gold glazes. The sleek woman is as golden-red as the atmosphere through which she rides. Like many of Reed’s heroines, she looks away from the viewer. Lost in her own dreams, this Guinevere turned gallant knight, this Woman of La Mancha sets out on a vision quest that mixes the legendary and surreal with the deeply personal.

Through June 30th

Included in Pinkney Herbert’s David Lusk exhibition “Broken Time — Progressions” is Fanfare 1, a pulsing pastel on paper. The work’s lime-green and deep-blue asymmetrical rectangles — framed in red and surrounded by jagged strokes of black — powerfully parallel the show’s title, which is the jazz term for irregular, improvised syncopation. The overlapping ovals at the heart of drawing looks like the lips of the trumpeter opening and closing around the mouthpiece of his/her instrument reaching for the high notes and crescendos.

In a decided departure from Herbert’s driving sometimes explosive style, Tower 3 is a tall but fragile structure in which lines climb, change direction, intersect, and go back up and out as Herbert reaches for that open-ended framework that facilitates fresh vision and the creation of highly original pieces of music as well as works of art.

Through June 30th

Everything glows with life in WKNO 1091 Gallery’s “Artist Spotlight Exhibit: NJ Woods and Marie Babb.” In Woods’ high-key acrylic painting When You’re on a Hill, You’re Closer 2 da Moon, the lightning bugs are huge and children climb a hill as steep as a mountain. An enormous moon shimmers in the sky. Small shacks take on a life of their own as wooden slats turn gold in the moonlight and steep red roofs blow in the wind like the sheets on the clothesline at the bottom of the hill. The painting’s ebullient child-like joy doesn’t register as kitsch, as Grandma Moses-quaint, or even as exaggerated. Instead, Woods reminds us, this is the way children experience the world, the way they remember the magic.

Through June 30th

Some of the most sensual and iconic works of Niles Wallace’s career are currently on view in his Gallery Fifty Six exhibition “Sticks and Stones.” Dozens of deliberately misshapen stark-white ceramic bowls fill the top shelves of Wallace’s 8-foot-tall Collection Cabinet. Fired with a single glaze, Wallace’s colors are sometimes as crisp as the white and black halves of a yin-yang symbol, sometimes as nuanced as tea stains against hairline cracks in a porcelain cup, sometimes as sleek as the petal of a rose.

On the bottom shelves, Wallace places one plastic container inside another and warps both bowls with a heat gun. These surprisingly beautiful bowls writhe, reach out, and fold back upon themselves — sometimes tortuously, sometimes with delicate grace. These asymmetrical, shape-shifting works of art speak to every aspect of the creative process — ideas gestating, art and life evolving, and imagination as malleable as molten plastic.

Through June 25th

Clare Torina’s most powerful paintings in the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’ show “In the Blood” trace a woman’s journey from subjugation to self-empowerment. In Hysteria — a diptych that references the now-debunked 19th-century medical diagnosis describing sexually frustrated women as diseased and neurotic — a beautiful woman appears on the verge of sobbing or screaming. Her nostrils flare. Her face muscles tense. She is back-dropped by pitch-black shadows and a green so acidic it suggests nausea. The screeching baboon in the painting to her left further heightens our sense of the terror and rage one feels when morally/sexually/ideologically subjected to the will of others.

Torina is master of metaphor as well as paint. The bright-white moisture that pools beneath the woman’s lower lip and streams down her chin and neck looks, at once, like milk, semen, and foaming at the mouth. In a world in which sexual and gender attitudes are often as misguided as ever — the artist reminds us — unmitigated rage can turn to madness.

Torina counterpoints Hysteria with Vision Quest, a self-portrait of the artist cloaked in her grandmother’s furs and backed by a landscape that brings to mind two masterworks: Thomas Cole’s portrait of a summer storm, Oxbow, and da Vinci’s enigmatic, atmospheric Mona Lisa. Torina’s modifications of the masterworks are telling. In the storm behind the artist, the clouds are darker, the rain more torrential. Torina’s five-by-six-foot torso not only dominates the surface of the painting like the figure in Mona Lisa, it also towers above the viewer. Her full-red lips appear ready to devour or engage us in passionate conversation as she weathers life’s storms, claims her own space, and explores her own psyche, including its darkest, most primal passages.

Clare’s father, John Torina, takes a different but equally powerful path to “see” more clearly. Instead of searching the psyche, John Torina paints plein air in all seasons, all kinds of weather, at all times of the day. His large, windblown sunsets record thousands of variations of shape, hue, and light. His dark, wet fields reflect the panoramic dances playing out in the skies above.

Look close. With one stroke of a brush loaded with several pigments, Torina nails the bright, nearly white chartreuse light that streaks across the thick carpet of grass in Pecan Grove. Torina’s observations are so acute, his technique so accomplished — this body of work elicits synesthetic responses — we feel as well as see the lush, warm grass in Pecan Grove and the crystalline cold surface of the frozen pond that mirrors a gray-blue winter sky in Sun and Ice.

In Nightfall, Torina convincingly captures the copper-red scattering of light as the sun drops below the horizon. This waning of energy is so seamless, we witness what could be the sun or a soul slipping from seen to unseen worlds as Torina takes us from spring to winter, from first to last light.

Through September 26th at the Dixon

You’ll find another powerful vision quest in Mary Reed’s Magic Carpet in David Perry Smith Gallery’s “Summer Group Exhibition.” In Reed’s mixed-media painting, a woman with luminously red hair wearing an equally iridescent dress sits on a huge polka-dotted quilt that fills most of the work. Running throughout the oversized, overstuffed Magic Carpet are ribbons the color of iron-rich soil. The woman’s face turns away from the viewer toward a swatch of umber fabric at top left that looks like a darkened window. Reed’s iconic redhead is the artist, is the viewer, is every woman (or man) whose passions simmer, whose full and fertile imagination is ready to soar.

Through August 31st at David Perry Smith

By combining poems of love and transcendence with digital images of a 19th-century maximum security prison, Jason Miller and Lauren Coulson have created “Poetic Visions,” a body of work at Material gallery that is at once spiritual and unnervingly personal.

The only still-intact objects in the crumbling prison cells are metal bed frames that stand as metaphor for our deepest passions and dreams. The beds are empty, the prisoners long dead, but we can still hear their emotions in Miller’s poems.

Miller and Coulson’s most powerful collaboration, Found My Love, reminds us that the imagination is much harder to imprison than the body. A long, arched hallway is blurred almost to abstraction by sunshine pouring through skylights on the ceiling. Across the center of the image Miller writes, “Found my love on the riverbed/Staring up through the flowing glass/into the clouds of dreams that passed.” This work serves as the show’s physical and spiritual climax as Coulson’s luminous photos of rot and Miller’s surreal poetry blur all boundaries and sound the clarion call: These tombs are about to open.

Through August 28th at Material