"Dirk Rathke: Room Drawing for Houston and Wall Objects" Dirk Rathke's monochromatic paintings on shaped canvases call to mind the work of Ellsworth Kelly. While Rathke's canvases aren't quite in the same league as Kelly's, they do have their own quirk: they're three-dimensional -- skewed from side to side, with surfaces that are concave, convex or lopped off at odd angles. He builds up his thick, smooth layers of pigment on the nubby surface of the canvas using colors like traffic orange or luminous, acidy yellow. For most of the pieces, the canvas is stretched over solid wooden forms rather than a stretcher framework. Rathke could more easily paint on the forms themselves, but using a traditional painting surface like canvas is part of his point. He leaves the sides of the canvases raw, emphasizing the material. The three-dimensional surfaces and the layer of paint flicker between painting and sculpture. Through February 24. Gallery Sonja Roesch, 2309 Caroline, 713-659-5424.
"The Flat File: Works on Paper and Video" Tucked in the back gallery at Rudolph Projects/ArtScan Gallery is a tiny DVD player screening Federico Solmi's animated video King Kong and the End of the World (2005). With an expressive and sketchy cartoon style and an evocative soundtrack by his wife Jennifer, Solmi presents his own goofy take on a King Kong movie. In his video, King Kong "loves the art world" by smashing the Guggenheim Museum into Gagosian Gallery. The giant ape has lunch on Wall Street, eating stockbrokers -- and puking them up. He battles the Statue of Liberty. He climbs the Empire State Building and pees all over the city. Then the world ends, and God tells Solmi and his wife Jennifer to repopulate it. The video is supremely silly and well done; Solmi revels in his crackpot brand of surreality. It took 1,100 drawings for him to create the video, with animation by Russell Lowe. Several whiteout-encrusted examples of the drawings are also on view. Through February 10. 1836 Richmond, 713-807-1836.
"Similar Differences" Sheila Klein's fabric work and Kate Petley's sculptures are on view in this color-saturated exhibition at the Art League Houston. Sheila Klein uses synthetic materials in cheesy vintage hues that could have been appropriated from an old Lawrence Welk Show performance. To make Grecian (2006), she sewed vertical strips of diaphanous fabric together into a rectangle and hung it on the wall like a painting. There's a section of ruched peach nylon and a segment of frothy ruffled blue the color a Welk tuxedo. In the center is a risqu piece of sheer black, like a stocking with a garter line. Another panel of bouffant white netting might have been filched from a polka dancer's skirt. It's a wonderful exercise in color, kitsch and fabric. Also on view is Klein's installation Thin Place Threshold (2007), which consists of six colorful curtain panels, all hung on parallel tracks in the center of the room. Kate Petley's sculptures share the gallery with Klein's work, but unfortunately the proximity doesn't do either one of them any favors. Their "similar differences" -- color and architecture-ish sculpture -- just make the room look disjointed. And in spite of similarities, the works aren't similarly successful. Like Klein, Petley is also working with some interesting materials: resin, acrylic and sheets of polycarbonate. But where Klein just needs to ratchet up what she's already doing with the materials, Petley needs to figure out what to do with them at all. Through March 2, 1953 Montrose Blvd., 713-523-9530.
"The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures" This exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston surveys a hundred years of work by American photographers. Three powerful works by three renowned photographers stand out. One of the earliest photos in the show is Kate and Rachel, taken in 1907 by James Van Der Zee of his wife and young daughter. The image is a lovely, sentimental, turn-of-the-century scene, but Van Der Zee's photos are important for another reason, too -- he created some of his era's few photographs of black people by a black photographer. Russell Lee photographed farmers, sharecroppers and migrant workers, illustrating their plight. At first glance, his FSA Clients at Home, Hidalgo County, Texas (1939) looks like a Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post. But as you get a little closer, you see some "what's wrong with this picture?" details. The man's sock has a gaping hole; the wife's hair net is torn; her worn, dirty shoes look like they were taken off a dead hobo. The seemingly straightforward photograph speaks volumes about the sweeping devastation of the Great Depression. Margaret Bourke-White's striking photograph A Blast Furnace Under Construction in Ural Mountains as Part of the First Five-Year Plan, Magneto-Gorsk, USSR (1931) depicts a massive construction project in Magnetogorsk, a city newly made in the remote Ural Mountains for the purpose of mining iron ore and processing steel. We share in the photographer's awe at this massive industrial complex arising from nothing, but with the benefit of hindsight into the atrocities that came with industrialization under Stalin, we see a ghostly afterimage. Through February 25. MFAH's Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main, 713-639-7300.
