There is some commonality between the three artists in Challenge #4, though. Shelley Spector, Judy Gelles, and Erica Zoe Loustau all employ the human figure and writing to one degree or another. They also work on a similar medium-size scale, and their art shares a touch of the past, a somewhat melancholy quality. Except for several of Spector's pieces that produce sound, this is an especially quiet, reflective show by Challenge standards.

Spector's found-object sculptures and photographs, which occupy the first room of Fleisher's Louchheim Galleries, make a strong immediate impression. Her colorful pieces look like Depression-era toys rejiggered by a hobo, and are installed to perfection. (I'll assume Spector, a former gallery owner, was responsible.)

The carved-wood word pieces, with their intentional misspellings and lack of punctuation, and her gigantic American Ruler, a seven-foot strip of wood printed with a color photograph of a real vintage ruler, are more interesting than her audio or kinetic pieces. The latter include a wooden phonograph that plays old-fashioned songs but whose turntable doesn't revolve, or the Blockhead-type figure that continuously lifts and lowers a ball.

Spector is also showing a group of new, deeply vertical photographic prints of vertical objects, among them a zipper, a belt, a chain, the spines of a few National Geographics - all of which she has altered (she often replaces a brand name with her own surname, among other things) with humor and charm.

I'm not sure I've ever before seen a sculpture that reminded me of a children's book illustration come (almost) to life, but that's what Loustau's Rapunzel's Longing does: A puppetlike female figure sprouting yellow hair dives downward through the air, surrounded by a flock of black birds. The figure is made of stuffed muslin, her startling hair is broom straw, the birds are cut black paper, and all are supported by numerous strands of monofilament strung from the floor to the ceiling. Loustau's installation is accompanied by her pen-and-ink drawings of a similarly titled story; they also look like children's book illustrations. This version of the Grimms' tale could have used a little more weirdness.

Gelles, who has two projects on view in a concurrent but unrelated exhibition at Moore College of Art and Design (through March 15), has created new works she calls "Word Portraits" that, like her video and photographs at Moore, deal with people's perceptions of themselves and others. This project is more complicated than either of her pieces at Moore, however, and becomes too much the sum of its parts.

For this project, Gelles conducted interviews with couples about each other, then made artworks of them by photographing her transcriptions of their words and printing them side-by-side, superimposed on blurred photographs of the side-by-side couples. The photographs of words and couples are then printed on Duraclear mounted on Plexiglas.

The point of this project is to reveal the real (unnamed) people behind their blurred shapes, and their perceptions of each other and their relationships. Their responses - and they constitute as broad a swath of the Philadelphia metropolitan area as you can imagine - are fascinatingly frank. But the mechanics and layers of Gelles' pieces tend to obfuscate her intended clarity. Her projects at Moore get to the heart of the matter right away.

Three on the road

Let's hope that Jocelyn Firth opens her own gallery here some day soon - Philadelphia could use another discriminating eye like hers. For the time being, she has rented the immense back gallery at the Crane Arts building for You Might Find Yourself, a three-person show of color travel photographs by Ian Baguskas, John Francis Peters, and Thomas Prior.

Baguskas, an admirer of the early photographer of the American West, Carleton Watkins, is showing quirky landscapes he encountered in Utah, northern California, Oregon and Washington. Peters is represented by his candid shots of China's Guizhou province and its people, and Prior by his work of the last five years, an unsettled time for him that resulted in intriguingly unsettling images.