Visual Arts

"Click Chicks +: Mostly Women Photographers" at the Dallas Contemporary hits its high point just inside the front door. Three color photographs by Naomi Harris take an uncompromising look at the sagging flesh and bad clothing choices of elderly retirees enjoying the sun and beach in Florida.

NATALIE CAUDILL/DMN

Naomi Harris' Cibachrome photograph Three Sisters Getting Out of the Ocean

The saturated colors of her Cibachrome prints let you feel the heat of the sun as it bakes her subjects. The images are harsh and funny but not sadistic. Her subjects add to the parade of fallible humanity that has been one of the staple subjects of photography for most of its history.

Ms. Harris is not breaking particularly new ground here, but the rest of the exhibition comes off as a checklist of current photographic strategies, seldom rising to her level. Displayed here is what all the participants learned in art school. Now they just need to get out and take more pictures.

Among the strategies on view are:

Naomi Harris' photographs at Dallas Contemporary's 'Click Chicks' exhibit include Marie and Sonja by Pool.

•Serial imagery: Kyung Duk Kim makes a 100-image grid of the same photograph of a folded green duvet. Gerardo Repetto's 222 matches are photograms, a process that reverses positive and negative elements so the burnt matches appear white against a black background.

•Digital tricks: David Wilson repeats the same figure between four and a dozen or more times in a single composition. The results can be amusing, but they never serve any clear purpose.

•Blurry miniatures: Deborah Bay places tiny people on tabletop settings and shoots them out of focus.

•Adolescents staring at the camera: In this case, Moira Lovell's portraits of female soccer players.

•Puzzling additions to photographs: For reasons best known to herself, Alejandra Chaverra has poured a clear encaustic medium over her black-and-white images of Cuba.

Charles Dee Mitchell

"Click Chicks +: Mostly Women Photographers" continues through Aug. 23 at the Dallas Contemporary, 2801 Swiss Ave. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-821-2522, www.thecontemporary.net.

Google, YouTube, reality TV and the Patriot Act have collectively eroded the private sphere. With his untitled machine- and hand-sewn white plastic underwear, the Los Angeles artist James Gilbert delves deeper into the misfortunes of the privation of privacy: Your privates are now public.

James Gilbert's drawing Buying a Pair of See Through Underpants is on view at Light & Sie.

A pile of Mr. Gilbert's plastic panties sits on the floor and a neat stack lies inside a plexiglass box on a white podium in the back gallery at Light & Sie. The panties are the only unworn garments in the would-be soiree suggested by Mr. Gilbert's installation of plastic luminescent garments hanging from the ceiling. Made of industrial-grade translucent white plastic, hep suits and haute couture dresses dangle from the ceiling on invisible acrylic thread. Anonymous and uninhabited, they mingle in groups of three and four.

Without faces, the figures in Mr. Gilbert's black-and-white line drawings circling the wall give form to a logic of celebrity that works in inverse proportions. The more of you that is public, the less of you there is. Mr. Gilbert shoots Jane Austen's 19th-century London through the prism of the 21st-century Los Angeles as he makes a statement on society's obsession with stardom and recognition.

Charissa N. Terranova

"I Know Everything About You and We Haven't Met" is on display through July 19 at Light & Sie, 129 Leslie St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. 214-745-2255, www.lightandsie.com.

Kirsten Macy enlists contrary forces in her new body of work at Barry Whistler Gallery.

The paintings are calm, even soothing, depictions of explosion. The white surfaces seem simply wrought but are the result of painstaking work and an adroit hand. From afar, they look like plain white paintings with little going on. Upon scrutiny, they bear layers of activity, suggestion and expression.

The collision of opposites is subtle but decisive. Everything Is Perfect is a 3-foot-square white canvas with five orange and red bars receding into the background. Gray-white lines shoot to the back and front creating varying perspectives and a sense of vertigo. Along the horizon, billows in layers of white, blue and gray constitute the form of an explosion. Tiny white pixel-like squares float in a white sky. Ms. Macy layers two distinct dimensions, with the white horizon from the conventions of landscape painting and the orange and red bars and pixels from computer graphics.

In The Day Before and the Day After, she enhances the sense of inner-ear imbalance. Foreshortening lines in white on white recede back and dart forth. The lowest precinct of the painting suggests the space of a sunken freeway.

A performance and installation artist, Ms. Macy proves her extraordinary talent as a painter here. On two small canvases in opaque white and putty-gray, I Hope Nothing Bad Ever Happens to You is a diptych showing distinct forms of explosion: one minuscule and billowy, the other midsize with thin splashes shooting upward.

With Ms. Macy's reticently offered explanation –"They embody some kind of nostalgia for the Cold War" – we find one final collision of opposites: longing for yesterday's cataclysmic future.

C.N.T.

"New Paintings," by Kirsten Macy, is on display through July 26 at Barry Whistler Gallery, 2909-B Canton St. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and by appointment. 214-939-0242, www.barrywhistlergallery.com.