Through Nov 22.

Ken Fandell
Howard House, 2017 Second Ave, 256-6399.

Through Nov 29.

If you had never seen the sky--is you'd only ever heard it described by other people would you know it if you saw it? What are the essential features of the sky? What does the sky mean?

The sky, of course, can mean pretty much anything we care to project on it. It's hardly--despite the way it just sort of hangs there in the summer--what you'd describe as neutral territory. In art and in literature it's done heavy lifting in service of the pathetic fallacy (which requires a storm to rage in the background of a fight to the death); it's always there to deflect attention from other, weighter matters. Never mind that it's pollution that gives us those glorious salmon-streaked sunsets that evoke romance and destiny and God; there is no more convenient container for our unruly emotional overflow than the glancing sky.

Linda Davidson has let the sky overflow over 500 small paintings, and when you stand back they come together like a whole sky that moves from dull high haziness to unrealistic blue to dramatic storm back to blue (somehow less unrealistic this time) and then becomes a mass of clashing, noisy color--the sky at apocalypse, perhaps. But each piece could also be a whole sky unto itself, and I'm hard pressed to think of any other entity that can survive being divided so mercilessly, that is so infinite and also irreducible.

There's a lot of variety in among the paintings, and some of them are less convincing than others, although it requires some thought to understand that the meat of the question is how far you can abstract the sky and still recognize it. Some of Davidson's panels could have been excised from a Piero della Francesca painting; others, on close inspection, are patterned--a series of tiny blue circles, or the kinds of airy nautilus whorls you find in "eclectic" textile designs from the 1990s. There's one panel that shows the sky as a cluster of white contour-map-like curves imposed on an undifferentiated blue background, and this is an attractive theory, that the sky only looks flat but is in fact full of various volumes. The effect of stepping back from close inspection tells you that the sky in reality--never mind painting--is inherently impressionist, a mass of vapors willfully organized into a snapshot.

There's intellectual and sensual pleasure in Davidson's sky, but Ken Fandell's work is like a delirious sock to the sternum. His large-scale photographs have an intense painterly quality, largely because more than anything they recall the kinds of ornate, cloud-filled sky paintings that fill the domes of Baroque cathedrals, the kind of sky that announces the presence of God but also allows the painter to show off a little. What Fandell has done is to photograph the sky multiple times from a single point over the course of a few days, and then montage them together. The result is a massive, impossible sky that gives you no sense of direction or gravity, with light coming from everywhere and an airy feeling of weightlessness; the point is that so much had to be manipulated to create something that feels, without looking, real. There's also no sense of scale, until you notice a tiny seagull captured toward the center of one of the images, and the effect of this is to blow the work's dimensions out enormously, until you are very nearly engulfed by it.

My favorite of Fandell's skies is an almost symmetrical notched shape that more or less spins around a center hole (I once learned that a single hole of blue in a cloudy sky is known to weather forecasters as the "sucker hole"--embodying the quality of the viewer rather than the viewed). There isn't any symmetry, but you keep looking for it. And in case you've forgotten the natural province of these unnatural works, a tiny DVD player shows a quick loop of all the sky images that Fandell used in his montages--like Davidson's fragmented horizon, the sky taken apart into smaller skies, the puzzle undone but not remotely unlocked.