Galleries: Fabric's texture transforms dancers' images

On first impression, David Noonan's silk-screened linen collages mounted on wooden supports project an aura of formality and stillness on the crisp white walls of UArts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery. A closer look reveals something else altogether: These icily elegant, tidily constructed works are embodiments of taboo avant-garde performances, brimming with erotic overtones.

For many of these works, Noonan appropriated archival photographic images of Japanese Butoh dancers, which he then cropped and enlarged and silk-screened onto glued-together patches of linen and jute. His transposing of his own reinventions of production shots of dancers onto textured surfaces has given photographic images that were once starkly confrontational a look of mystery and timelessness. At the same time, his isolated images, tactile surfaces, and fabric edges that appear to be sewn rather than glued heighten the fetishistic nature of his works.

Asked to list his filmic influences in the October 2006 issue of Frieze magazine, Noonan cited Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, Werner Herzog's The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner, and Alain Resnais' Providence among his favorites. Little wonder his own art is so layered, stylish, oblique, and satisfyingly strange.

UArts' Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, 333 S. Broad St., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. 215-717-6480 or www.uarts.edu/about/rosenwald-wolf-gallery. Through Friday.

Tina Newberry's solo show at Schmidt Dean Gallery catches the artist - formerly of Philadelphia, now based in Bloomington, Ind. - on a roll. And, as usual, in a role. In "Delusions of Grandeur," 18 new paintings further indulge Newberry's long-standing affection for the Civil War, with herself posing as the central and every auxiliary character in them.

The majority of the paintings depict Newberry as a cross between her contemporary self and a high-ranking Union soldier, usually in informal interior domestic scenes, and in a state of relaxation (she sometimes also adopts the persona of a Founding Father). When not seated, this character seems to be showing off photographic images of battle scenes that Newberry has collaged into her paintings like cartoon balloons, slightly reminiscent of Charles Willson Peale's self-portrait from 1822, The Artist in His Museum, in which he raises a curtain to reveal his museum's interior.

Many works, especially Newberry's close-up self-portraits, which capture her as the Founding Father type - a combination of Thomas Jefferson, say, and George Washington - depict her caught between two competing forces. In Look at Me When I'm Talking to You, her face is flanked by two tiny shouting female faces wrapped in curls of drapery. Me, Myself, and I shows her between tiny portraits of a Union and a Confederate general (both with their own versions of Newberry's humorously disguised face).

I'm generally not a fan of decorative elements attached to picture frames, but Newberry's lacey Victorian-style embellishments are the perfect complement to her curiously delightful images.

Schmidt Dean Gallery, 1719 Chestnut St., 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. 215-569-9433 or www.schmidtdean.com. Through Oct. 10.

Since the early 1990s, the photographer Vincent Feldman, a lifelong Philadelphian, has been training his lens on the city's numerous abandoned buildings, particularly on those with distinguished architectural pedigrees, such as the United States Naval Asylum, designed by William Strickland between 1827 and 1833, and the Divine Lorraine Hotel, built as the Lorraine Apartments in the 1890s and designed by Willis G. Hale. In fact, looking through Feldman's eloquent exhibition at the Athenaeum, "City Abandoned: Charting the Loss of Civic Institutions in Philadelphia" and his book of the same title (Paul Dry Books, 2014), it's hard to find a building that wasn't spectacular in its day.

Some of Feldman's subjects have gotten lucky, like the Naval Asylum and the eventually-to-be-restored Divine Lorraine, but far too many of these former beauties are moldering in plain sight.

Athenaeum of Philadelphia,

219 S. 6th St.,

9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. 215-925-2688 or www.philaathenaeum.org. Through Oct. 31.