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All eyes on tattoos, up close

Susan Moore's paintings pose many questions.

Celia Reisman's painting, "Village Green" (2007), oil on canvas, is at Gross McCleaf Gallery through Nov. 28.
Celia Reisman's painting, "Village Green" (2007), oil on canvas, is at Gross McCleaf Gallery through Nov. 28.Read more

If you happened to see the family-friendly "Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos" at New York's Drawing Center in 1995, you'll recall that the exhibition steered away from troublesome images of the tattooed.

Instead, it offered tattoo artists' intricate, colorful works on paper and related vintage ephemera, such as advertisements for tattoo parlors. It even boasted an old-fashioned tattoo machine. Tattooing was presented as a quaint, legitimate category of Americana, a cousin of the carnival.

This is not remotely the mood that Susan Moore is conjuring in her recent paintings of tattooed figures at Locks Gallery.

These 11 large works depict tattoos on various men and women in such a way that only the tattooed sections of their bodies are shown - chests, arms, legs, backs. Occasionally, the lower half of a person's head might be revealed, but beyond gender and body type the only identifying features are the tattoos.

In contrast to their vivid, elaborate markings - rendered in emphatically sharp relief by Moore - her subjects have a cadaverous pallor and stillness heightened by the fact that she has left several inches of blank canvas around their bodies so that their extremities appear to fade, ghostlike, into the neutral background.

Moore's paintings make a viewer question what it is that is more unsettling about them - her cool, even formal, depictions of complex networks of tattoos on anonymous, flaccid flesh, or her subjects' desire for permanent, somewhat extreme physical expression that is just as likely to be kept private as not. One thing is certain: Moore's paintings catch tattoos up close and still, as they rarely are seen by the curious eye, and their vining, snaking quality is a little frightening. The title of her show, "Second Skin," is extremely well-chosen.

Village people

Celia Reisman's lusciously colored, stylized paintings of houses in a Vermont-like village remind me of moments in a novel between the written words. People are seen covertly, glimpsed; more often, their presence is implied through a light in a window, a garden tended to Peyton Place perfection, or a waiting dog.

Reisman's relationship to this world is reminiscent of Alex Katz's to his summer home in Maine, in that there is little or no affect in either artist's images (her Spartan style and large areas of flat color bring Katz to mind, too.) But where Katz is unapologetically mute and out for the big picture in every sense, Reisman is hinting at small-town narratives on modest canvases. Her paintings are alluring as they are now, but they would be more exciting as large-scale works, with no little people minding their own business in them.

Swell digs

Vox Populi's current group show of four looks smashing in the gallery's spacious, relatively new (as of last spring) quarters. Entire rooms are devoted to each artist's efforts, including sculpture installations by Jonathan Prull and Andrew Suggs and wall installations by Amy Adams and Stephanie Dotson.

Its Screening video lounge, conceived and programmed by artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, is showing a video by Takeshi Murata, Untitled (Pink Dot), in which imagery borrowed from Sylvester Stallone's 1982 film First Blood melts into multi-colored puddles of paint, or so it seems. A fluorescent-pink dot pulses between scenes, in case your mind hasn't already been blown. Murata has shown his films at MoMA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and recently had a solo exhibition at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

You go, Girls

The Guerrilla Girls, those internationally known gorilla-masked feminist avengers who've taken the white, male-dominated art world to task for decades now, are bringing their one-of-a-kind act to Chestnut Hill Saturday, to an art symposium at the all-girl Springside School at 8000 Cherokee St. The fun starts at 10:30 a.m. when the Girls give their presentation; in the afternoon they'll also conduct a workshop. The event is free, men are welcome (if they dare!), but reservations are required. Call 215-247-7200, Ext. 6145, or e-mail

» READ MORE: pmoss-vreeland@springside.org

, indicating your school affiliation, if any, and the number in your party.