Last Chance

Catch it or regret it

by Holly Otterbein

Joseph Hasenauer OCTOMOM: Barbara, by Joseph Hasenauer, from the exhibit "Lil' Pus ... a girl's best friend" at Bambi Gallery.

Bridgette Mayer Gallery

If you only ever saw the world from an airplane, you might think there was some sense to it. Thousands of miles up, a seemingly unstructured housing development transforms into an elaborate, premeditated set of circular patterns. A graveyard full of minimalist crosses becomes an example of breathtaking symmetry. Streets have order. Cities, for once, look planned.

In her exhibit "Inhabit," Dana Hargrove makes this all too clear, with her acrylic paintings of highways, airports, offices, apartment complexes and roads looking like mere geometric abstraction until you take a step closer. But the implications are more unsettling: A dozen or so paintings dubbed "Interstates," which are identical except for color palette, force you to reckon with the absence of variety in our transportation systems. Her "Facade" series, depicting offices and hotels, makes you think the same thing about shelter. Are we woefully uncreative and utilitarian for not thinking up new ways to rest, work and schlep to and fro? More importantly, what is viewing the same man-made landscapes, in city after city, country after country, doing to us?

"I aim to highlight the beautiful unification of space," says Hargrove in her artist statement, making it sound as if she somehow advocates such monotony. Everything does look lovely from Google Earth, after all. But, says Hargrove, the point of her work is to remind people that what looks like "controlled seamlessness that belies any difficulties" is, once you inch closer, just "a façade." Ends Sept. 25, 709 Walnut St., first floor, 215-413-8893, bridgettemayergallery.com.

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It's cutism, sure, but it's also surprisingly libidinous. In Virginia, a young woman sits on the toilet beside a golden octopus, her panties dangling around her knees. Likewise, Julia depicts a lithe brunette bathing nude with a chestnut-colored octopus — its tentacles who knows where. Ends Sept. 26, Piazza at Schmidt's, 1001-13 N. Second St., 267-319-1374, bambiproject.com.

Everything about Robert Horvath's "Recent Works" yells futuristic — it's a collection of slick, glittered-up, seemingly computer-generated depictions of the universe. Yet he utilized nothing more than glazing, a laborious, old-school process in which paint is layered atop paint that is layered atop more paint, to render aliens and outer space. Ends Sept. 25, 224 N. Juniper St., 267-603-1295, jolielaide.com.

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)