A display of vases, quiet, with poetry from vets, artists

Last year, at Locks Gallery, Jane Irish pulled out all the stops with her monumental paintings of opulent interiors, rendered in De Kooningesque pinks, yellows and blues, and simultaneously bearing the searing testimonies of Vietnam vets in raised letters that were almost disguised by the pretty painting over them. Irish's unlikely combination of materials - oil paint on workaday Tyvek - echoed the dichotomy of her images.

The tone of Irish's current show at Locks, "Cochin Chinoiserie," is quieter, even elegiac, as though one has entered one of those hushed, empty rococo sitting rooms from last year's paintings. The play of dichotomy continues to be a strong force in Irish's work, this time carried out in lushly decorated whiteware vases in the style of 18th- and 19th-century French Sevres porcelain, onto which Irish has also painted poetry written by Vietnam veterans and the visual arts writers Tom Devaney, Vincent Katz and Carter Ratcliff. One vase features excerpts from a speech by Mario Savio, the political activist and Berkeley Free Speech movement leader.

Mounted on wall pedestals, these hollow but externally gorgeous objects strike you as the most unlikely surfaces for the passionate writing they display. A large triptych painting from 2001-02 - one of the artist's best-known works, juxtaposing images of protest with those of decadent beauty - hovers near the center of the back of the gallery, like a coda to the show.

Irish, who received an Independence Foundation Fellowship in 2008 that enabled her to spend 25 days traveling and painting in Vietnam, is also showing a series of small "plein air" paintings of landscapes that were sites of combat during the Vietnam war. These are almost eerily uneventful and undistinguished, much like Stephen Shore's color photographs of landscapes - a throwaway-snapshot sort of glimpse, but painted - and they too speak of dichotomy. But here, on, say, an empty, placid beach framed by jungle, one can only imagine the scene's horrifying opposite.

All that glitters is gold in Sabine Friesicke's paintings on paper. The artist, who is having her first solo show with Gallery Joe (and is German and based in New York), paints grids of one color of gouache, such as red or light blue, over and over a field of gold until thin lines or tiny squares and rectangles of gold are all that remain, flickering like beacons of light against the matte gouache. She also paints grids of gold over a color until the color is almost obscured, or horizontal lines of gold on plain paper.

These are beautiful, hypnotic works: simple, repetitive, and spun entirely by hand and eye.

Simon Frost, a British, Brooklyn-based artist who is also having his first solo show with Gallery Joe, has filled the gallery's Vault space with his "Oculus" series of drawings of circular forms made up of hundreds of vertical lines of silverpoint or graphite.

Though each piece of paper is the same size and each drawing's circle is 20 inches in diameter, Frost is not aspiring to old-school minimalism. The lines he draws vary in thickness, making a part of a circle look darker and dense, or lighter and airier, than the rest of it. In fact, the longer you look at Frost's drawings, the more irregular they appear to be.

Like Friesicke, Frost has developed a process of accumulation that doesn't just reflect its materials, but achieves a sense of humanness through the obvious touch and motion of the hand.