Galleries: Now even in summertime, serious art is in season

Summer in the city used to mean those predictably bland group shows of gallery artists that allowed everyone more time off and got no one talking. Those kinds of snoozy shows have become increasingly scarce, though, as the art world has become more and more like the real world. Many galleries are now treating the hottest months as an extended spring or fall season, even as an occasion to make a counterintuitive splash.

Just a few years ago, for example, "Introspective/Retrospective," a show of three West Coast artists organized for Fleisher/Ollman Gallery by the L.A.-based musician and self-taught artist Chris Johanson, would likely have been given a fall or spring slot. But summer was apparently considered a perfectly good time for this exhibition.

There is a laid-back, summery feeling to Johanson's show, which is actually a pair - a two-person and a one-person show.

"Introspective" pairs the works of Chris Corales and Joe Turner, who live in Portland, Ore., and San Francisco, respectively, are self-taught, and use discarded and found materials in their work.

"Retrospective" gathers paintings, illustrations, sculpture, and book and magazine covers by Christine Shields of Sacramento.

Johanson met these three through music and social circles when they all lived in San Francisco.

From a distance, Corales' subdued, beautifully made found-paper compositions could pass for minimal abstract paintings. His least tidy, least quiet work, an uncharacteristically colorful three-panel 2007 piece titled Trams on the Rattle, is the earliest work of his here, but its seemingly intentional awkwardness made me think it was the most recent. I hope some of that color finds its way back into his work again.

Johanson encountered Turner's small figures, fashioned from pipe cleaners and twist ties, above the bar at the Uptown, in the Mission District. Here, in a pristine gallery space, Turner's renditions of human characters, skeletons, and dragons struck me as the kind of obsessively made self-taught works that Fleisher/Ollman Gallery might ordinarily exhibit. The stances and gestures of Turner's figures are eerily lifelike without appearing at all studied.

Shields' show, of works dating from 2003 to the present, is a more uneven presentation than Corales and Turner's, possibly because her pursuits have been more diverse (music, 'zines, comics, performance, sculpture, illustration, and painting). It's best viewed as an installation. Shields' Gothic sensibility and quirky humor are present throughout her work, especially in her remarkable 23-painting Conspiracy of Beards, a piece completed in 2005 that used to comprise 24 portraits and honors the unrealized vision of Peter Kadyk, a San Francisco artist who envisioned an all-male choir that would sings the songs of Leonard Cohen. (Kadyk died of AIDS in 2001 and his friends and others formed a choir of the men portrayed here, minus the painting of a man who bought his portrait in 2005.)

Not your everyday summer show, by a long stretch.

Getting up those four flights of stairs is going to be a serious test of will when the temperatures climb into the 90s, but James Oliver Gallery's genial 18-artist group show "Femme" is worth the effort.

There is a distinct Pop Art flavor to much of the work here, beginning with Oliver's own painting Moving Forward, a graphite and paint line drawing of a woman with sunglasses on her head on a white canvas. (It's a no-no for Oliver to exhibit in his own gallery, by the way, but I'm excusing it in a show of this size.)

Nick Cassway's black-and-white photograph of a woman holding a camera, printed on computer-cut vinyl mounted on Plexiglas, resonates Pop immediately, too, as does Fahan Sky McDonagh's Overflow, of red glass rose petals in a hand-carved pate de verre cup, a few of which appear to have fallen on a black glass "saucer" shaped like a puddle.

Pete Cecchia's two giclee prints on canvas of composites of photographic images of women in various stages of provocative undress seem straight out of Darling, A Clockwork Orange, and other British films of the '60s.

Here and there, Oliver has included works that fit his "Femme" theme but not his cool Pop aesthetic, most conspicuously Ernie Sandidge's large painting, After Eakins, of a pregnant nude woman seated in a chair and wearing a scarf over her eyes. It's a powerful, sinister image, but it grates in this company.