Galleries: Two female artists' polar-opposite art viewed side-by-side

Two contemporary female artists - Jenny Drumgoole and Frances Trombly - have the two large galleries at Moore College of Art & Design to themselves, and their work is evidence of how diametrically opposed certain strains of contemporary art can be, while existing on the same cultural plane, side-by-side in the same venue. You wish politics could get with this model.

Like your art hyperactive, comedic, and narcissistic? That would be the videos and installations that make up Jenny Drumgoole's "Real Women of Philadelphia." The Philadelphia-based artist is having her first solo exhibition in Philadelphia in Moore's Levy Gallery for the Arts in Philadelphia.

Drumgoole, whose entertaining performance videos have been shown locally in group shows, has once again managed to infiltrate and hijack a competitive event in her latest work.

In something of a follow-up to her earlier video Wing Bowl 13, in which the artist had herself filmed while serving as a Wingette at WIP's annual eating competition in South Philadelphia, Drumgoole here offers films of herself creating repulsive-looking entries for a Philadelphia Cream Cheese online recipe contest sponsored by Kraft Foods and Paula Deen.

There are other videos, too, among them Drumgoole's instructional take on how to flip your (long) hair; a video of women flipping their hair in imitation of Drumgoole; and another in which Drumgoole and her mother confront Deen and the Kraft people at the awards ceremony. Some of this is invented; all of it parodies reality TV.

Her show, which was organized by Jonathan Wallis, an art history professor at Moore, has many funny individual parts and moments - the hair-flipping women and the artist sculpting a Sylvester Stallone "Rambo" head out of cream cheese among them - but it's hard to make sense of it as a whole, as a distinct narrative. Drumgoole seems to want you to lose yourself in her weavings of fact and fiction, as she herself appears to do. It's definitely the easiest way to approach her show.

Frances Trombly's exhibition in Moore's Goldie Paley Gallery is as quiet and reflective as Drumgoole's is caffeinated.

Trombly, who lives and works in Miami, makes facsimiles of parts of everyday objects in woven fabric. The positioning of those woven objects is integral to Trombly's practice, too; she is so skilled at throwaway placement that the casual observer walking into the gallery might think her show is in the midst of being installed or taken down.

Leaning against a wall is a "mop" that could easily pass for the real thing, fashioned by Trombly from hand-spun silver wool and cotton and attached to a real mop handle. A flattened brown "cardboard" box with a "UPS label" lying on the floor is in fact embroidered, handwoven fabric with authentic packing tape on it.

But the artist's most uncanny pieces are her stretched, unsized "canvases" leaning against walls and resting on two-by-fours. The two-by-fours and stretchers are real, but the "canvas" is Trombly's handwoven fabric, replete with irregularities common to machine-woven canvas.

You assume, looking at the parts of Trombly's trompe l'oeil pieces not made by her, that she could copy those, too - in some material other than fabric if need be - because she is clearly good with her hands, in favor of time-consuming processes, and a perfectionist. But their presence adds to the humble, unassuming quality of the works in their entirety. They're not quite the opposite of Duchamp's ready-mades, and that's a good thing. They'd be too obvious, and too cute.

James Hyde, who spent his childhood in this area, has been showing his paintings in New York galleries since the 1980s, but, as his show in Philadelphia at Jolie Laide Gallery proves, he is still a kid, taking risks that artists half his age might not dare. Actually, Hyde has been pushing painting as we know it to the limits for at least a decade. (How about a painting as a pillow, or a hot-water bottle, or a spectator chair?)

His latest works, hybrids of painting and photography, take the geometric, jazz-inflected abstract paintings of Stuart Davis (also a Philadelphia native) as inspiration. In these pieces, Hyde has isolated passages from Davis paintings, photographed them, blown them up to monumental scale, printed them as ink-jet prints, attached them to a stretched canvas, and painted over parts of them using a roller.

It's hard to tell which painted areas are Davis' and which are Hyde's, and that is the spirit of community between painters and musicians that Hyde conjures in these works. Most of the them depict one or two vastly enlarged letters from Davis' paintings, which aren't always immediately identifiable. Looking at them, and waiting for a letter to make itself apparent, I thought of the glacially slow acceptance of new art of all stripes in Davis' time, and how quickly we embrace the new today.

Across the street, in Jolie Laide's other, less-formal space, Hyde is showing a group of painted sculptures that, like his paintings on photographic prints, fuse mediums - and even house plants - with unexpected, intentionally jarring, results.