The dark, occasionally giddy “Man Up’’ has edge and elegance. At the center hangs Jesse Burke’s montage of color photos that spotlight intensely masculine themes with self-consciously artful beauty. The portrait of the smudgy football player in Burke’s “Post Game’’ looks positively beatific. Shot-gunning beer, which involves shaking the can and poking a hole in it to shoot the foaming brew into your mouth, is a recurring motif, with inevitably sexual overtones. There’s also the image of a deer carcass, and “Open Country,’’ a starkly lit image of a bare-chested man in a hunting mask known as an executioner’s hood. The images tell stories of vulnerability and aggression, toeing the thin line between them.
All the works here grapple with that theme. Rune Olsen’s remarkable motion-filled sculptures, made of masking tape and paper on steel armatures to resemble drawings, come vividly to life, capturing moments of fierce assault, when the assailants see only red. Most of Steve Locke’s lush, economical paintings address a masculine companionability that is both exposed and competitive.
El C. Leonardo preens in his video, “El C. vs. The Invisible Man — The Highlights,’’ in which he plays a masked Mexican wrestler taking on an invisible foe in front of live audiences. His accompanying drawing, “El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man,’’ a diptych depicting him and his competitor (negative space framed by the audience) in the same posture, suggests that he is his own adversary. That theme underlies every work here, and marks “Man Up’’ with unexpected melancholy.
Celebrating the mundane
In the 1980s, Richard Sheehan was a thoughtful, exuberant painter of Boston, but the artist, who died at 52 in 2006, hasn’t had a show here since 1991. He married, moved to Rhode Island, and became an involved dad. Most of the works in his solo show at Alpha Gallery date back to the 1980s; some stretch into this past decade.
