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There's nothing new about artists recasting everyday objects as art, but New Yorkers John Michael Boling and Javier Morales energize this old trope with their video, sculpture and collages at And/Or Gallery. Writer Charissa Terranova takes a look at this new-media group show, while Charles Dee Mitchell reviews a Photographs Do Not Bend exhibit documenting Japanese "love hotels" and trompe l'oeil works by Kirk Hayes at Conduit Gallery.

Misty Keasler at Photographs Do Not Bend

While Misty Keasler was shooting images of Japanese love hotels, the manager of one establishment asked her to describe American love hotels. When the Dallas-based photographer explained that in the United States we have no love hotels, the manager could hardly believe her.

PDN Gallery

Gulliver's Bathroom by Misty Keasler

"Love Hotels" are a peculiar phenomenon of contemporary Japanese culture. In a crowded urban environment, they are retreats for couples, married or not, who are looking for privacy that their homes often do not provide. In many hotels you can check in, order room service, spend your time, check out and never see another human being. Their origin might lie in a seedier sort of establishment, but love hotels have been transformed into theme parks for sexual liaisons. Couples fill out effusive thank-you notes when they leave, and young people swap information on the Internet about what venues have the most imaginative rooms.

Ms. Keasler's color photographs, currently at Photographs Do Not Bend and recently published in a book from Chronicle Press, document both the playfulness and sometimes antiseptic creepiness of the phenomenon. There are the predictable doctors' offices and schoolrooms, but she also shows us themes ranging from Hello Kitty to outer space. References to snowmen and Gulliver's Travels are particularly odd, and the Japanese predilection for bondage runs throughout the exhibition.

Ms. Keasler has photographed Russian orphanages and the communities that spring up around public dumps in Central America. In all these projects she works as both an investigative reporter and an artist with a keen eye for storytelling through pictorial composition and visual nuance.

Charles Dee Mitchell

"Love Hotels" continues through March 24 at Photographs Do Not Bend, 1202 Dragon St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-969-1852. www.pdnbgallery.com.

Kirk Hayes at Conduit

Conduit Gallery

Brief+Extravaganza by Kirk Hayes

Kirk Hayes has shown frequently enough in Dallas that by now most visitors to his exhibition at Conduit Gallery will know that his collages of torn paper and cut tin mounted on sheet metal and plywood are not what they appear to be. Or more to the point, they are not collages at all. They are trompe l'oeil paintings in which each scrap of material and every surface is an illusion meticulously rendered in oil and enamel paint on signboard.

Trompe l'oeil techniques date back centuries and have served both high art and high-end interior design. But Mr. Hayes uses his ultra-realism to depict forlorn and funny tales of burning castles on barren plains, hollow displays of power and human beings in precarious, usually hopeless situations. Masking tape and nails appear to hold cardboard and tin to scratched and smudged surfaces. His is an abject vision somewhat ameliorated by the bright colors he favors.

Mr. Hayes exercises the appeal of a master illusionist. If he hadn't gone into art he might have become a magician. Illusions are disarming for an audience. They draw us into a world and pull the rug out from under us. We marvel at technique, and what is particularly disarming about Mr. Hayes' work is that such a level of technical prowess should go into creating something that comes out looking so scrappy.

Charles Dee Mitchell

"Brief Extravaganza," with Michael Krueger, continues through March 24 at Conduit Gallery, 1626-C Hi Line Drive. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-939-0064. www.conduitgallery.com.

Group show at And/Or Gallery

There's nothing new about artists recasting everyday objects as art. In a shift from the material to the virtual, New Yorkers John Michael Boling and Javier Morales energize this old trope, treating the moving image of cast-off videos as so many "everyday objects" ready for reframing. What links Mr. Boling and Mr. Morales to Austinite Chad Hopper, also showing at And/Or Gallery, is a shared fascination with recent obsolescence, a love of objects and images from the 1980s.

And/Or Gallery

A frame from Blood Fantasy by Javier Morales and John Michael Boling

Mr. Hopper's found-object collages and sculptures replay the high-low antic of appropriation in the same old way. Mr. Hopper's Man vs. Machine vs. Dogs, two small beat-up, throw-away toy collie dogs mounted on a background of red felt in a wooden frame, is a composition in fragments. This detritus-as-art reflects another aspect of the everyday: consumerism. Mr. Hopper's objects strike an aesthetic of the rickety, childlike and impoverished. There is little novelty, but you might ponder the status of your old GI Joe buried deep in the city dump.

Technological medium knocks heads with representation in Mr. Boling and Mr. Morales' Body Magic, a video montage of scenes from an aerobics contest on Sally Jessy Raphaël's talk show and dancing preteens on the Barbie Dance Club, both circa 1983. The forever-new feel of video collides with the unavoidable anachronism of women doing aerobics in fluorescent spandex and young white boys with spiked hair mimicking Michael Jackson.

In quoting 1980s video footage, the two artists twist the temporality of "obsolescence." We recognize that the styles of clothing, hair and eyewear are out-of-date yet the crispness of video, its color and image resolution, seems perennially present. Blood Fantasy uses a similar grammar of mixed imagery, creating a greater sense of abstraction in the juxtaposition of figures and patterns: aerobics dancers, King Tut, a woman breastfeeding, and sequences of pixilated light in blue and fuchsia.

Charissa N. Terranova

New-media works by Chad Hopper and John Michael Boling and Javier Morales continue through April 7 at And/Or Gallery, 4221 Bryan St., Suite B. Hours: 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays and noon to 6 p.m. Saturdays. Free. 214-824-2442. www.andorgallery.com.