Galleries: Dufala Brothers make a discreet gallery their own

While Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery has embraced contemporary art of late, it's still not the place you'd expect to find a survey of the work of the Dufala Brothers, Billy Blaise and Steven. Trying to picture their rejiggered objects and vehicles - the stuff of flea markets and junkyards transformed into bizarre follies of the brothers' imaginations - in that leafy suburb, let alone in Cantor Fitzgerald's hushed, bespoke environment, was frankly difficult. Now, having seen "Problemy," I have a slightly different impression of the team. They actually can make anything their own.

For one thing, the exhibition's curator, Matthew Seamus Callinan, and the Dufalas have created an exhibition of almost exclusively small- and medium-scaled sculptures (no looming ice-cream truck / army tank, the piece that won them the West Prize in 2009, here), along with drawings, photographs, and watercolors that also complement the gallery's scale. For another, there was clearly an effort to match the discreet atmosphere of these rooms with the Dufala's works, which has given the gallery and its installation the look of a collection in a house or a museum. (I wouldn't be surprised if the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Duchamp gallery was a model for this show). Sometimes the demurring is humorous, as in the mannered, clustered display of a group of bathroom-humor - and I mean that literally - drawings mounted on the gallery's back wall.

I had seen several of the sculptures here before, such as their greatly enlarged, engorged armlike hammer and witty elongated sneaker, but even these familiar works had a different, distinctly specimenlike quality in this exhibition. And facsimiles of an armchair and a sofa rendered in pink fiberglass insulation - works that would immediately read as "art" in the usual stark white gallery setting - lend their particular corner the look of a modernist-style, if slightly odd, living room.

The Dufalas' watercolor paintings of netlike compositions made up of hundreds of bottles lashed together are the anomalies of this show. They're recycling made undeniably beautiful, and stand in direct contrast to the scatological, R. Crumb-ish drawings on the back wall.

This is one of those rare moments in the otherwise seamless "Problemy" when you're reminded that the Dufalas are, one, both still young, and two, artists.

Paint in print

The Print Center smartly chose Isaac Tin Wei Lin to inaugurate its "Makeready" series, launched to showcase works by contemporary artists who employ the printed image innovatively.

Walking through "One of Us," Lin's site-specific installation, it's hard to distinguish the printed images from the painted ones or to determine whether Lin considers himself a painter, an installation artist, a printmaker, or all of the above. It's a perfect demonstration, in other words, of printmaking's versatility and ubiquity, and of contemporary art as the great melting pot of mediums.

There is more painting in Lin's show than any casual viewer might think, it turns out. Walls of what appear to be painted calligraphic gestures are actually printed, while smaller areas, as on the freestanding cartoon cat figures that appear to be printed, are painted. The 3-D glasses that visitors are encouraged to wear struck me as a cute conceit - enhancement of this complex installation seems unnecessary.

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Dana Hargrove

Dana Hargrove is on to a new, exciting body of work, but her show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery catches her in transition from her last show, as has become all too common in solo exhibitions here.

Hargrove's recent paintings of architectural facades composed of bars of strong colors should have had the gallery to themselves; instead, groupings of earlier works are hung in close proximity to them and diminish their impact.