Visual Arts

The letter "e" functions trickily in the English language. It is often silent and transformative, making short vowels long. It is also the most common letter of English. But the English are not the only ones tripped up by tricky "e." The mid-20th-century French writer Georges Perec wrote A Void entirely without using the letter.

Conduit Gallery

Justin Quinn pays homage to the power of the letter 'e' in The Line (version 3) and other works on paper at Conduit Gallery.

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Justin Quinn pays homage to the power of the letter "e" in his works on paper at Conduit Gallery. Idiosyncratic and obsessive, the pieces in "Breathe He Must, or Die He Will" are the result of transcribing chapters from Herman Melville's Moby Dick into swirls, lines and dazzling patterns of the letter "e." He maintains the punctuation of the text while translating each letter of every word into the letter "e."

Mr. Quinn's works are graphic and lyrical in simplicity. Two-side Word Lists (2008) is made up of vertical lines of the letter "e." Far distinct from the up-and-down of this piece are the swirls of the letter in Six-word Phrases or 1,848 times E (2007).

Charissa N. Terranova

Through May 3 at Conduit Gallery, 1626C Hi Line Drive. Also showing are recent works by Vincent Falsetta and photos by Cédric Delsaux. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Free. 214-939-0064. www.conduitgallery.com.

Lightning started a fire in Wicked Creek, Mont., on Aug. 9, 2007. During the next two weeks, 28,600 acres burned.

Photographer Wouter Deruytter was staying at a ranch outside the wilderness area where the fire occurred. The elegiac color photographs he took during the fires and months afterward are on view at Light and Sie gallery in a show called "Wicked Creek."

While the fire was active, Mr. Deruytter did not have access to the fire zone itself. Smoke appears in the distance in a few of his images, but his main focus is on the second-response team of firefighters that arrived to contain the blaze. These are mostly men in their 20s doing difficult but well-paid work. They clear brush, create fire breaks and chop trees. They are private operators, somewhat like ambulance drivers, and during the season they go from fire to fire.

When Mr. Deruytter photographed them, they had just arrived. Their yellow shirts and green pants are clean, and the scenery surrounding them is spectacular. They are happy to pose for his portraits, and in fact everyone seems to be having a great time.

There is a real sense of camaraderie among the firefighters. Mr. Deruytter depicts them marching off in the morning, shovels and axes in hand, and then trudging home in the evening. He is showing us the everyday aspect of a catastrophe.

He went back in November to photograph the burned-out areas. Charred trees still stand erect against a gray sky. A deer stands exposed on a denuded hillside. The first snow has fallen, blanketing everything in white. The scene is peaceful, eerie and sad. It's a sublime landscape that three months earlier had reached a temperature of 1,000 F.

Charles Dee Mitchell

Through May 24 at Light & Sie, 129 Leslie St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-745-2255. www.lightandsie.com.

IRVING – Sony's introduction of the Portapak, a portable video recorder, in 1967 democratized moviemaking and the capturing of real-time events. Artists took hold of the new technology, creating the new genre of video art.

Though made when the medium constituted cutting-edge technology, the five videos showing in "Video Art: The Early Years" by Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson and William Wegman look decidedly low-tech and dusted with the patina of time. One might be dismayed that a medium that should deteriorate before it has the chance to fossilize in the museum seems so old.

The most successful of the five showing in the Haggerty Gallery at the University of Dallas is Ms.Jonas' Vertical Roll (1972). Unlike the other four videos, which are too literal and weighed down by politics, Vertical Roll possesses an abstract beauty and jittery formalism that gives it a longer life.

Ms. Jonas deploys the technological malfunction of the vertical roll, when the image on the TV screen moves up or down revealing bars in between, to create a disjunctive rhythm. A woman's torso, presumably hers, framed by a stripper's bejeweled bra and pants slowly rotates. As the body turns full circle and disappears from view, leaving behind only a shadow, Ms. Jonas appears in front of the screen looking directly at the viewer. This layering, the shot of Ms. Jonas' face in front of the broken stills of the vertical roll, provokes awareness of the crafting behind the seamless reality of video.

Mr. Wegman's Spit Sandwich, a black-and-white video from the early 1970s of the artist spitting on a piece of bread and smoothing it with a knife, has lost its charm. It is neither funny nor clever.

Mr. Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) infuses the form of the documentary film with the poetics of stream-of-consciousness prose. The video tells the story of the creation of Mr. Smithson's eddy-shaped earthwork located along the northeastern shores of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. His interest in decay, entropy and infinite time are evident as images of dinosaurs rival shots of the giant landform.

Ms. Antin's Nurse and Hijackers (1977) seems especially relevant today. She uses paper dolls, a miniature makeshift cardboard set of an airplane's interior and airport and herself dressed as a nurse to create a lighthearted story of serious stuff – oil, hostages, terrorists, Israel, Libya, Algeria and Egypt.

Ms. Rosler translates collage into video in Domination of the Everyday (1978). Famous for her edgy collages critical of the Vietnam War and now Iraq, Ms. Rosler cuts fast between images of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, posters telling of the unemployment rate and photos of herself with her child to try to break asunder a Leave It to Beaver television contentment.

Charissa N. Terranova

Through May 4 at the Haggerty Gallery at the University of Dallas, 1845 E. Northgate Drive, Irving. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. 972-721-5087. www.udallas.edu/art/haggerty