Mara Baldwin's canny combination of wallpaper and watercolor, "How to Remember Where You Put Something"

Image courtesy of Triple Base

The piece's two painted sections aren't simply indexes for what's gone missing (which may not have even existed in the first place). Executed by Baldwin's steady, patient hand, the painted sections also draw attention to what they are intended to replicate: the banal, mass-produced wallpaper that surrounds them. By flattening background and subject, Baldwin makes painting the aid to memory of the piece's title, while also suggesting that "putting on a new coat of paint" always involves some form of erasure. Chechu Alava's soft-focus portrait of a sylph-like young woman in a slip is more conventionally ghostly, but not nearly as haunting as Foster's hidden graffiti or Baldwin's yellow wallpaper.

MORE TOPOGRAPHICS

As I wrote two columns ago in my review of the multi-gallery show "They Knew What They Wanted," the George Eastman House's 1975 exhibit "New Topographics" — currently hanging in a reassembled version at SFMOMA — continues to cast its shadow over contemporary art and curatorial practice, particularly where landscape is concerned.

"Land Use," at Oakland's Swarm Gallery, could easily be a satellite to both exhibits. Bill Mattick's color photographs documenting the ecological cost of urban and industrial development in Southern California are the closest relatives to the grim indictments of such "New Topographic" participants as Joe Deal, Robert Adams, and Lewis Baltz. Chris Sicat's pieces of reclaimed wood "colored in" with soft graphite pencils are less successful as sculptures than as documents of the artist's attempts to work within natural form of his materials. Sculptor Reenie Charrière takes a similar tack with manmade waste, aggregating the plastic bits that don't make it to the recycling center into playful, biologic forms.

NOW, IT'S ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE

Through Aug. 29

Triple Base

3041 24th St., SF

(415) 643-3943

www.basebasebase.com

LAND USE

Through Sept. 12

Swarm Gallery

560 Second St, Oakl.

(510) 839-2787

www.swarmgallery.com