Timmy Dowling
Houston, 860-7820.
Through March 10.

Leslie Clague
The Little Theatre, 675-2055.
Through Feb 25.

Carol Bolt
King County Art Gallery, 296-7580.
Through Feb 23.

Accumulation is a sticky wicket. We would all like to believe that we are not our possessions (flashy SUV owners excepted, I guess) and that our identity runs deeper than what we can afford to surround ourselves with. Remember George Carlin's rant? "If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house... a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get... more stuff!" I want to believe that I am greater than the sum of my stuff, and yet the first thing I do when I go to someone's house is check out the bookshelves. We do--admit it!--tend to equate the contents of our lives with the contents of our minds and souls.

Timmy Dowling's photographs at Houston show guys, most of them in their early 20s, with their stuff. David is shown in a bathing suit, standing in a contrapposto pose that is a distant variation on the famous Michelangelo boy of the same name. The room is mostly empty--gray, wall-to-wall carpeting, a few girlie pics tacked up behind him--but for a big television and a heap of video-game cartridges scattered around his feet. Some milk and cookies sit heartbreakingly in the foreground. He's a study in arrested development (sex, snacks, video games) and the way the photograph is framed doesn't give David any way out: He is what he is.

Jeremy aims a plastic gun at the camera, in a closet stacked with lunch boxes, action figures, immaculate rows of albums, more plastic guns, toys, and some clothes shoved aside in the last remaining wedge of space. Noah sits on his untidy bed, the wall behind him covered (there's hardly a bare inch) with Madonna posters. Noah himself is in the languid process of putting on a sock, with parted lips and bedroom eyes that are less Hollywood than housing development. He's like an outtake from a music video, Madonna slumming in a Southern California suburb. Both of them are their things, taking their identity cues from the objects surrounding them, superhero and boy toy.

Clutter can also be seen as a diagram of the artistic process, as in Leslie Clague's installation at the Little Theatre. She's filled two sets of shelves with stuff from her studio. This includes detritus specific to the kind of work Clague makes (jars filled with copper leaf and dried pigment, piles of cut felt, light bulbs, scraps of wire and twig and string) along with objects she's fashioned out of these things: light bulbs in a protective corset of colored telephone wire, trophies upholstered in gray felt, an old pocket watch wrapped in Saran Wrap.

This is not sculpture in the traditional sense. Rather, these are the kinds of things artists make between projects, the sculptural equivalent of doodling. These objects investigate ideas of covering and containing and refashioning the useless into art, all things that she thinks about on a larger scale as well--which you can see in the lobby in the form of a huge wire missile/phallus/pointing finger wrapped meticulously in rubber. The effect of looking at the installation is as accumulative as the way it's built. The more you look, the more you see. It's stuff-as-mental-map, the raw materials of thought shown next to some of the many possible permutations.

Finally, the idea of accumulation is raised into the conceptual sphere by Carol Bolt's installation at the King County Art Gallery. It's called, appropriately enough, More, and is built almost entirely out of starlight peppermints (you know, those red-and-white mints that come with the restaurant check). One large sculpture, right inside the gallery door, reads "more please," with a pile of mints next to it for viewers to take. The other sculpture is at the back of the gallery and reads "thank you." Viewers are invited to put the wrappers from the mints in another pile, this one growing while the other shrinks. Bolt is addressing the idea of need and suggesting that we learn to recognize when we have enough, even if what we've received is in a form we didn't expect. She takes the shame out of accumulation and the need that precedes it, although I suspect she's thinking more about piling up emotional or psychic things than material goods. I like Bolt's vision, like a gentler version of The Communist Manifesto: Take what you need, give what you can, have a mint.