March is as hectic a month as any for Houston’s art scene. But several gallery exhibitions are worth moving to the top of the must-see list.

Sarah Williams: On the Periphery

Sarah Williams, MoDOT. McMurtrey Gallery

The lonely gas stations, car washes and diners in Sarah Williams’ paintings could be almost anywhere in the United States.
But these sensuously painted, depopulated scenes aren’t dry studies of vernacular architecture, documents of road trips or ironic commentaries on the generic flavor of American life. Rather, they speak of the North Texas-based Williams’ connection to the rural Missouri where she grew up.

The importance of these places to her comes through, as do implied narratives heightened by the nighttime setting and foreboding mood. Setting her paintings after dark gives Williams ample opportunities to depict artificial light in all its variations, sometimes in a single work. Cameron Carwash includes the warm red and amber glow of street lamps and the eerie green and yellow reflections of the garage’s fluorescent lights.

Williams adds to her pictures’ psychological tension by putting viewers at a distant vantage point from the buildings, making them seem perpetually out of reach. This approach also yields painterly payoffs as Williams consistently manages to make the foreground — usually a parking lot, not necessarily paved — interesting. In Essex Junction, the regularity of the stenciled white parking-space numbers and yellow borders is distorted by the wide-angle view. In MoDOT, a web of tire tracks criss-crossing a snowy foreground turns up a cornucopia of textures and colors.

Some of the newest works, inspired by a recent return home marked by unusually clear night skies, depart from strict realism to include constellations, adding a mystical touch to her scenes.
This is Williams’ third outing at McMurtrey Gallery, and she’s quickly establishing herself as a brilliant painter of haunting nocturnes. Through March 19 at McMurtrey Gallery.

Heimir Björgúlfsson: The Classical

Heimir Björgúlfsson, Obsolete and surrounded by hail V. CTRL

As an Iceland-born artist who resides in Los Angeles, Heimir Björgúlfsson must feel like an element in a collage: extracted from one environment and plopped into another, wildly different setting. Because Los Angeles, perhaps even more so than Houston, presents unlikely juxtapositions everywhere one looks, the sense of surreal dislocation must be especially intense.

Having once dreamed of becoming an ornithologist, Björgúlfsson often puts exotic birds — perhaps stand-ins for the artist — in the middle of his collage paintings and sculptures. The bird in All the Light of the World is set against a loose gridlike pattern of spray-painted dots that seem to serve as shorthand for an urban wasteland. A pair of mortars and pestles incongruously float against the field, perhaps offering wry commentary on painting.

The sharpness of the bird and objects plays off the fuzziness of the sprayed dots in All the Light of the World. A similar tension between clarity and soft focus is at work in a group of more purely photo-based collages, which strike me as some of Björgúlfsson’s most exciting work to date.

In some pieces, the space inside one photograph seems to spill out into the surrounding space of a larger photo; in others, objects fit seamlessly into landscapes where they don’t belong.

For example, Obsolete and surrounded by hail V features chunks of mineral ore — at first glance, they resemble potato chips — hanging from telephone wires in a desolate Icelandic landscape populated with crumbling billboards. That kind of eccentric interplay between natural and man-made worlds pervades this show. Through April 2 at CTRL.

Jim Nolan, Studio Painting. Art Palace
Jim Nolan: Today is Tomorrow

Jim Nolan brings a do-it-yourself punk sensibility — and, one suspects, a love-hate relationship with minimalism — to his sly solo exhibition at Art Palace. Assemblages such as MaybePartyingWillHelp/Bucket — which combines a tablecloth, bucket, fake flowers and push pins to surprisingly elegant effect — draw most or all of their materials from dollar stores, suggesting an ethos of making art out of whatever’s available.

Elsewhere, Nolan plays with painterly signifiers, only to deliberately undermine them.

At first glance, Palisades Paintings/Brown, Red, Yellow, Blue looks like a suite of four gestural paintings; they turn out to be photos of those paintings printed on canvases. Studio Painting is actually a photo of Nolan’s paint-splattered studio floor printed on a canvas that is then turned on its side, giving the image a Barnett Newman-like vertical composition.

Formerly New York-based, Nolan is now in Houston, which is good news for admirers of the resourcefulness, restraint and contrarian wit to be found in this show. Through April 2 at Art Palace.

This post includes and expands upon material from an earlier post about Williams' work.