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By Dan Leone

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TRACKING DOWN THE missing links in her family history took Heather Johnson to North Dakota, where she found a lot of wide-open space but not too many answers. She translated her journey into Telling Time by Remote Control, a huge art installation on one of Ampersand's gallery walls, and it turned out to be a strange and empty kind of map. It doesn't have any city names or highway signs – just a few strands of cotton thread leading from one unnamed spot to another, and here and there a "snapshot" of a scene that stuck in her mind. Each of these pictures is actually a piece of embroidery that Johnson sewed by hand. Sewing usually has folksy, womanly, old-fashioned connotations, but the exacting realism and intricacy of Johnson's work gives it a completely different – almost obsessive-compulsive – feeling. Empty Tables and Chairs in the Desert, another of Johnson's sewn art projects on display, is a collection of throw pillows made out of old mattress pads. On each she has embroidered (in precise typeface) a different "two-second memory," as she calls it. They're all intensely personal, but often in a strange and distant kind of way: "Lance's missing ear," or "Passing out anti-radiation pills in the food court," or "Mom tells Menot to give the retarded girl a Hershey Bar." Artist Tommy Becker, who like Johnson currently lives in San Francisco, is showing Daily Docudrama, an installation comprising three video works, in Ampersand's adjoining gallery. He is also interested in empty spaces and vague feelings of displacement and alienation, but more in the context of romantic relationships. Scripts for Limited-Involvement Relationships uses phrases from Hallmark cards to take us through the life cycle of a love affair, and Newfound Freedom shows us the agonized wriggling and twisting of a man wearing a foosball player's costume. Thurs.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and by appointment, 1001 Tennessee, S.F. (415) 285-0170. (Lindsey Westbrook)