The best of School 33's three newly opened shows is in Gallery II upstairs, just like the last time around. But "New Work" by Tex Andrews doesn't win the prize because the show in the main gallery downstairs disappoints. It wins because of the merit of Andrews' work.
Andrews calls his works sculptures, and most of them are, indeed, three-dimensional. But they may combine any of a number of media including painting, drawing and photography, as well as industrial materials such as wooden beams and steel bolts. His works remind us of the relationships among the natural world, the man-made world and human beings. They are not polemical, and they do not contain obvious environmental messages -- they are broader and deeper than that, speaking in a general way of our place in the world.
The largest and finest of the works here is "Screen for Diana," a 7-foot-tall and 21-foot-long piece featuring a drawing of woods and stream; it's attached with huge steel bolts to supporting wooden beams. These beams and bolts emphasize the fragility of nature and the pressures we put on it with all our industrial development. "Diana" may refer to a specific person or to Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt.
"Waterfall" combines three images, a photograph of a stream between paintings of a landscape in a storm and a hand holding a glass into which water flows. This speaks of the complex ways in which all life relates to water and all lives are related to one another through it.
Andrews possesses both mastery of materials and their combination and originality in dealing with familiar themes.
Downstairs, a three-person show includes paintings by Todd Bernave and Peter Brunn and tiny books combining images and text by Carol Fastuca.
Some of Fastuca's books are intriguing, addressing gender-oriented issues such as male-female relationships, conception and childbearing. But her mode of expression in others is so oblique that it communicates little.
With their whirling arrow-like shapes suggesting motion, Brunn's colorful abstract paintings owe something to the early 20th-century movement called futurism. The better ones are those with a narrower, more earth-toned palette.
Bernave's multi-part abstract paintings, reinterpretations of such visual aspects of urban life as graffiti, achieve a grainy, textured quality that tries hard to evoke the raw toughness of the city. These fall short of the power they aspire to, but show promise.
ART REVIEW
What: Three shows
Where: School 33 Art Center, 1427 Light St.
When: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays until Jan. 13.
$ Call: (410) 396-4641