"Gael Stack: The Jim Drawings" Gael Stack's most recent series of drawings at Moody Gallery was done in response to the death of her friend and fellow artist Jim Love. They aren't obvious or maudlin tributes, just thoughtful, delicate collections of images on casually torn sheets of vellum. The unmodeled line drawings are rendered in pencil and colored ink with deliberate lines. They're layered with loose, generally unreadable sections of writing and images culled from her repository of Asiaphile images; floating on the translucent pages, figures of philosophers and elaborately dressed women intermingle with snippets of architecture and text. Viewing these small intimate drawings is like peeking at stray memories plucked from the back of someone's mind. Through May 27. Moody Gallery, 2815 Colquitt, 713-526-9911.
"Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds 3: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies" Gunther von Hagens is the creator of the corpse-preservation process known as plastination, in which water and soluble fats are removed from the body and replaced with polymers such as silicone. The process results in lovely, long-lasting and odor-free cadavers! Just what we all were waiting for. The "Body Worlds" exhibition presents the products of von Hagens's process. Health education is the stated goal of the exhibition, and parts of it are really fascinating. It leads in with bones and skeletons, moves on to organs, and then hits you with the full-on corpses. There is informational text with each object, and the audio guide is quite good, giving you scientific information in layman's terms about bones, organs, nerves...This would have made biology class a hell of a lot more interesting. It's when von Hagens tries to get creative with them that things get tacky and questionable. At the entrance to the show, there's a skeleton kneeling with what is identified as a "Teutonic cross." Holding its heart in its hand, the skeleton still has its eyeballs, which goggle heavenward. And this is one of the mildest displays of von Hagens's Germanic tendency toward the macabre and baroque. The really low point is when von Hagens gets all Grimm's Fairy Tales with a figure whose muscle tissue is flayed away from his body, standing out like feathers. He is described as riding an "imaginary broom." Yeah, right: That would be his hands wrapped around his own trachea, standing in as the "broom" handle. Ultimately, von Hagens's P.T. Barnum showmanship overrides the educational aspects of the show. He may have developed this revolutionary method for preserving corpses, but perhaps somebody else should be appointed creative director. Through September 4. Houston Museum of Natural Science, One Hermann Circle Dr., 713-639-4629.
"Perspectives 151: Dan Steinhilber" There's a piece in this exhibition that looks like the work of a manic clown. The kind of balloons traditionally used by annoying children's-party entertainers to make hats and animals have been twisted, amassed and woven together into a giant dense rectangle. Together they hang on the wall like a brightly colored, inflatable abstract-expressionist painting. Contemporary society is filled with all kinds of crap, and an increasing number of artists are using banal, mass-produced consumer detritus as building-block components for their art. If you do it right, cheap, dumb materials can transcend their origins and become amazing. But in this show, Dan Steinhilber doesn't fare so well. He manages a couple of clever works and a lot of one-liners. Among the clever: the work in which three high-powered blowers force air along the floor toward a pile of greenish Styrofoam packing peanuts in the corner. The air continually blows, forever shifting the pile back into the corner. The piece is participatory -- visitors have taken turns sitting in front of the fans and blocking the airflow, watching the pile of Styrofoam rearrange itself. It's certainly a new take on kinetic work, and it's the strongest piece in the show. Too often, though, Steinhilber just doesn't do enough with his materials. In one work, a slender band of multicolored stripes on the wall turns out to be sticks of gum placed side by side. After the viewer's initial amused realization, the piece falls flat. While Steinhilber comes up with some promising ideas, he doesn't push them far enough. There doesn't seem to be a conceptual consistency in the way he addresses his materials. The show amuses while you're there, but little stays with you once you leave. Through June 4. Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose, 713-284-8250.
"Portraits" and "Purse Portraits" Do you mind if people look in your medicine cabinet? How about if they peer at the contents of your purse? Well, two photographers are doing just that, presenting intimate -- but anonymous -- portraits of people through the stuff in their bathrooms and purses. Coke Wisdom O'Neal's "Portraits" and Chuck Ramirez's "Purse Portraits" at Finesilver Gallery are full of nosy and intriguing images. O'Neal lives in New York and has a day job photographing architecture for a real estate company, a gig that gives him unfettered access to the homes of complete strangers. An inveterate medicine-cabinet peeper, he's channeled it into his art, photographically documenting the objects of his snooping. He prints the images life-size, mounts them on the back of Plexiglas and hangs them away from the wall, just like the real thing. He has duplicated the experience of voyeurism just for us. Looking at the images, you naturally try to picture the person behind each cabinet. So, um, who has five huge jars of Vaseline? An obsessive hoarder? Ramirez also explores intimate territory. He photographs purses in lush color against a white background and prints them up to five feet high. High Times (Rudy) (2005) actually depicts a "murse," or man-purse. It's a gorgeous leather briefcase containing a copy of High Times magazine, the arts section of The New York Times and a copy of The Economist. There's a rolled-up tie, a Continental OnePass Elite membership card and a tin of "Embarassmints" with the top of Bush's head barely revealed. The contents create the portrait of an affluent, well-traveled, left-wing guy who likes to smoke weed. Through May 13. 3913 Main, 713-524-3733.
