In 'Artadia' show, local artists share the spotlight

The works don't cohere, but each has its power. I never thought I'd see Gerry Bergstein in an exhibit with Jane Marsching. Bergstein, a dean of Boston painters, offers a riotous collage that busts off the wall and into the viewer's space, representing the fecund compost heap of his imagination, with snippets from artists from Michelangelo to Matt Groening.

Color theorist Josef Albers would love Marsching's playful but dark abstract video, in a landscape format with two bars of constantly changing color denoting predicted changes in the earth's temperature. Her soundtrack is an aria made up of headlines about global warming.

There's social conscience at work here. The National Bitter Melon Council and John Osorio-Buck often bring their work into the street. The first stages events with the bitter melon, a fruit used often in Asian cooking, to spark community. Osorio-Buck wittily explores issues of housing and sustainability with his portable kiosk, from which he can serve soup and have a small, solar-paneled greenhouse to grow vegetables; he could sleep there, too.

Everything deserves examination in this fractured show. Vaughn Sills has been shooting photos of African-Americans' gardens for at least 20 years, each jammed with meaning and magic. Stephen Tourlentes's photos of prisons look eerily like shots of the Emerald City, glowing and inviting from a distance.

Hannah Barrett's paintings conflate male and female features and recall 19th-century portrait photography; they are deadpan and disturbing. Xiaowei Chen's dense, masterful ink drawings marry humans and plants.