Artists lay it on the line

“Emerging Dis/Order’’ - an unfortunate title that all but screams “Fussy academics in charge!’’ - is, against the odds, an ambitious, approachable show well worth visiting. A better title might have been “Swarm Intelligence,’’ which one of the artists, Alison Hildreth, used for a series of paintings she worked on in 2005. It captures exactly the quality these three women have in common: a fascination with how forms multiply, divide, and coalesce again.

Hildreth delights in exploiting drawing’s potential to go beyond mere visual description. Her works here, on large, vertically oriented stretches of crinkly rice paper, are packed with information in different registers - botanical, cartographic, and so on.

The results are messy, at times, but deliberately so. Your eye keeps getting pulled back in, wanting both to read the information Hildreth conveys and to make her disparate forms cohere.

Coherence is built into the conception of Amy Stacey Curtis’s work. Curtis is known in Maine for staging shows - she calls them solo biennials - in empty mills scattered throughout the state, each installation exploring a different theme (“experience,’’ “movement,’’ “change,’’ “sound,’’ and so on).

The projects place a premium on viewer interaction (“without participants,’’ she had said, “my work is incomplete’’) and are marked by an interest in serial repetition and process. If all this smacks of cliché, the relief is that there’s a sharp intelligence behind Curtis’s work. Visually, it’s marvelous.

Her work here is a series of drawings she calls “27 Hours.’’ It’s the latest in a body of work that hinges on time and process. Back in 2009, Curtis made a series of 27 drawings, on the first of which she spent one minute, on the second two, the third three, and so on, up until the final drawing which took exactly 27 minutes to complete.