Philadelphia Weekly

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Two great sculptural installations push the emerging artist shows at Pageant and Fleisher-Ollman into the desirable (but often unachievable) zone of art as serious fun. It's too soon to tell whether new, fresh and accessible sculpture like this will save art from its self-imposed isolation in formalist concerns and hermetically sealed abstraction, but it might well point the way.

Jesse Greenberg's wall-to-wall installation at Pageant is the epitome of a new kind of friendly object-making, one that grows from whatever materials and methods are at hand into an installation that looks different each time it's shown. The end is more important than the materials, and the goal is almost theatrical�: to create a kind of stage on which the viewer prowls like an actor in a play.

Greenberg annoints Pageant's space with a hundred or more big and small objects. With his crazy mix of plastics, cast resins, found wood and other scavenged material, the local artist is one of the finest makers of this new kind of sculpture. His particular invention is what he calls binxe�s--small handheld objects cast and glued together. These are meant to be picked up and touched (they're for sale), and with their Jolly Rancher colors they look like toys.

Greenberg's larger works are fantasy furniture and art made for an alternate universe. These works are riding a contemporary collective unconscious�--like Eva Hesse did in her day. Their longing for Candy Land as well as for a place for spiritual connection is palpable.

The work is like nothing else being made anywhere. You could compare it to what's in "Unmonumental" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, but Greenberg's emphasis on the positive instead of the forlorn/abject puts his work in a class apart.

If Greenberg is the boy-child visionary, Kate Norton's sensibility is pinker, softer and more threatening (chains and feathers instead of resin), but she's a shaman and a dreamer/anointer as well.

Rounding out Pageant's show are Nick Lenker's digital prints of nude warriors struggling against powerful animal-headed powers, and Sarah Everton's bear, deer, bunny and horse paintings, which with their cute imagery are overshadowed by the extroverted works nearby.

At Fleisher-Ollman, Andrew Brehm's sculptural installation of a desk, a bookshelf and a living room for a young nomad living out of suitcases is both goofy and poignant. The stagey piece is evocative of students living on nothing but pennies and their imaginations, and also adults who dwell in similar circumstances. Jamie Dillon's sculpture Step Pyramid No. 2 with its circus colors and circus elephant ambience is a reminder of life's comedies. Also in the show are Stephanie Beck, Gregory Brellochs, Andrew Gbur, Jennifer Levonian, Ryan McCartney, Eva Wylie and Yvonne Lung.

The user-friendly sculptures exhibited in these shows point to a time when art was a dinner conversation opener instead of a conversation killer--and that's good for everyone.

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"Isskustvo Transmagica Provinces Animamina"
Through Feb. 3. Pageant: Soloveev, 607 Bainbridge St. 215.733.0309. www.pageantsoloveev.com

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"Street Button"
Through Jan. 26. Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, 1616 Walnut St., suite 100. 215.545.7562. www.fleisher-ollmangallery.com