Exhibitions at Tulla Booth and Demato galleries

Even trapped in the talons of another predictably brutal East End January, one can find surprises in familiar places, as is evidenced by current exhibitions at the Tulla Booth Gallery and Richard Demato Fine Arts Gallery, both in Sag Harbor.

At Tulla Booth, Jonathan Morse’s recent landscape photographs provide a sharp contrast from the life-size black and white nudes that he has exhibited in the past. Shot with a commercial digital camera, the works illustrate Mr. Morse’s understanding of structure and a subtle though assertive use of light.

In “Early Corn” (pigmented ink print), for example, the composition is established by the furrows between the rows conjuring a dramatic sense of depth. At the same time, the sun glinting on rows of cornstalks stretching into the distance creates pockets of shadow and shade that allow the image to become, at times, simultaneously sharply photographic and unexpectedly painterly.

This ambiguity is even more apparent in another photograph of beach grass in a snowy landscape, with the shafts poking through the dense blanket of white in ragged columns that seem almost rhythmically scribbled calligraphy, as if from a painting by Cy Twombly.

Another surprise at Tulla Booth can be found in a new work by Daniel Jones, a photographer whose use of spare and elegant black and white imagery has always highlighted, in a dramatically understated manner, nature’s grandeur, in large measure through the effective use of emotionally laden detail.

What makes the piece “Untitled” particularly interesting is the work’s use of color, which, as far as I can recall and from what is available on Mr. Jones’s website, is a significant departure from his previous output. Even more important is that the use of gentle hues, even as they impart a slightly surreal atmosphere, continue, with this artist’s masterful application of tonal variations, to conjure visions of the natural world that are strikingly evocative and mysterious.

Also featured are photographs by Burt Glinn, Karine Laval, Christine Matthai, and Blair Seagram. The exhibition at Tulla Booth Gallery continues through the end of February.

Down the street in Sag Harbor at Richard Demato Fine Arts is a winter group show that offers another interesting surprise in a new work by Gavin Ziegler that marks a truly dynamic departure from the styles of much of his previous work.

In lieu of the collage driven abstraction of his previous paintings or the geometric constructivism of his sculptural pieces, the new work revolves around re-interpretations of 1950s pulp fiction book covers, with an interesting emphasis on the motif’s natural tendencies toward lurid or exploitative narratives. Consisting of a series of 20 small canvases featuring rather scantily clad women who might be damsels in distress if they didn’t seem quite so edgy themselves, the works are highly suggestive and provocative, yet also somewhat strange and dreamlike in the possible storylines they portray. As a result, these works seem more reminiscent of posters by the Russian avant garde artist Gustav Klutsis than of a Mickey Spillane dust jacket.

Also owing a debt to the Russian avant garde, albeit in more of a constructivist vein, are recent works by Jim Gemake that are highly sophisticated despite their rather rough-hewn exteriors. Using various found objects collaged into a cohesive whole, pieces such as “Approaching Zero” and “Export” (both assemblage) are a combination of mechanics and form, the marriage creating tableaus that are rhythmically, harmonically, and visually engaging. They call to mind the surrealist Kurt Schwitter’s comment that technology is not divorced from humanity, but that “machines are abstractions of the human spirit.”

Also of interest at the Richard Demato Fine Arts Gallery are works by Harriet Sawyer, Michael Landi, Donato Giancola, Leslie Balleweg, Andrew Kowch, Laurel Schwab, and Jeff Weekly. The exhibition runs through February 14.