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Desire transformed at Samson, codifed at Krakow

Beverly Semmes and The CarWash Collective’s “Body Double” installation at Samson: “Inside Out Beekeeper Dress” and “White Six” (bottom). SAMSON

Feminists have decried the objectification of women for decades. Meanwhile, society is hooked on images like it is on sugar, and the objectification of women, and lately men, remains common currency. The CarWash Collective, a partnership between artist Beverly Semmes and fashion designer Jennifer Minniti, goes to the issue’s core at Samson. Minniti designed prototypes for a collection using Semmes’s “Feminist Responsibility Project” drawings as inspiration, and as patterns on her silk crepe de chine — drawings made on, and often redacting, pornographic imagery.

The nude has been transformed into the coverup. Yet, as in the drawings, there are peek-a-boo qualities, like the print revealed in the large cutout in the back of “Inside Out Beekeeper Dress.” The porn is largely disguised, and here abstracted into patterns.

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Where you can identify it, it’s silly. In “Pillowcase Bomb Dress,” a woman with dramatic eye makeup leans down, mouth open. Semmes colors over what’s in her mouth with a cartoony pink circle rimmed in red, subverting any hint of seductiveness. The artists print the image in a grid pattern; that repetition also takes the teeth out of any eroticism.

They enlarge a fraction of the same drawing in “Bomb Study Cutout,” a top with a bra shape snipped out. We see the bottom of the pink circle, and the woman’s long fingers beneath. This top would reveal more than cleavage. The CarWash Collective astutely disarms porn, yet still plays a potent game of veiling and unveiling.

Semmes’s ceramic works sit on the floor beneath the clothing, similarly laden with upended cultural signifiers. They’re vessels, mostly, but not especially functional. Roughly hewn with crumples and protrusions, they look like undersea creatures. “Bright Bookends #4,” does have utility, as Day-Glo yellow bookends. One has one handle, the other three, and seems to lean toward the first with hands on hips — a dynamic quietly echoed in the attitude the clothing embodies.

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Jenny Holzer’s “Arno, Blue” at Barbara Krakow Gallery.Barbara Krakow Gallery

The Jenny Holzer show at Barbara Krakow Gallery is a great primer on the premier conceptual artist. Holzer’s canny use of text exposes how language concretizes ideas, and how it can disable us from thinking on our own.

The earliest work here, the classic “8 Truisms” (1977-79), comprises posters listing bromides in alphabetical order. Read them and they have an earnest authority: “Disorganization is a kind of anesthesia,” “Humor is a release.” Each is emphatic and strangely reassuring, until you stumble over one you disagree with: “People who don’t work with their hands are parasites.”

Holzer recycles her texts in a variety of formats, imbuing them with different voices. Truisms carved into a granite footstool must be true — mustn’t they? But digitally projected — Holzer’s medium of choice in the last several years — truisms sliding and twisting on a dark wall are playful and passing.

“Blue Blue, text: Blue 1998,” (2003) is an LED sign, with text streaming across like news headlines. Yet the text feels intimate: “The pain is your signature and the start. We are no fit. . .” Words that might apply to a personal relationship transform, in this format, into something societal, something to be broadcast.

Sally B. Moore, who also has a show at Krakow, makes lyrical sculptures that convey a nerve-racking game of balance and disarray. The works embody life’s capriciousness and our tenacious desire to move forward.

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“Letting Go” sets two weights on either end of a slender bamboo. A worn old ball hangs on one side. On the other, a woman scrambles up a ladder, not letting go but toting on her back a slack man weighed down by a snarl of wire, wood, and stone. Things are not necessarily as they seem — like some of our burdens. The rocks, for instance, aren’t rocks. The artist made them. They may be lighter than they appear.

Moore’s sculptures have always addressed precariousness. Lately, the threat seems less from without and more from within.

Decoding the clouds

Bryan McFarlane’s “Lucky Cloud” at Gallery NAGA. Yang Chao/Gallery NAGA

Bryan McFarlane’s exuberant, expressionist paintings at Gallery NAGA straddle landscape and abstraction. In “Catfish in the Sky,” a carnival of clouds whirls against a sodden sky over a peachy rose beach. Most of the clouds are giant, juicy squibs of paint. A cobalt blue shape like a swaddled babe floats along the surface, and the curve of a glinting fish flails right behind its head.

The show, titled “Stories in the Clouds” fixates on these lively, colorful fluffs. “Lucky Cloud” sets two knots of them against horizontal bands of soft, gray tones, some running with drips and streaked with color. The two clouds — one hangs off the right edge, the other we see in full — are lumpy, assertive, and chatty. McFarlane and his wife recently had a baby, and it’s hard not to see something fetal in these forms — generative, wild with potential, a symbol of life.

Also at NAGA, Keira Kotler makes her pearlescent paintings glow. Kotler paints reflective material on a clear acrylic panel then adds layers of toned urethane, along with mica. “Pale Green, Meditation 2 [I Look for Light]” offers subtle progressions from pea green to mauve. It looks almost immaterial — a vessel for light.

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BEVERLY SEMMES & THE CARWASH COLLECTIVE: Body Double

At: Samson, 450 Harrison Ave., through April 25. 617-357-7177, www.samsonprojects.com

JENNY HOLZER: 1977-2013

SALLY B. MOORE: Reroute/Reroot

At: Barbara Krakow Gallery, 10 Newbury St., through April 25. 617-262-4490, www.barbarakrakowgallery.com

BRYAN MCFARLANE: Stories in the Clouds

KEIRA KOTLER: Luminous

At: Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., through April 25. 617-267-9060, www.gallerynaga.com


Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.