By Glen Helfand

THRONGS GATHERED LAST August at the first solo show by Simon Evans, an artist "discovered" by curator Jack Hanley at Adobe Books. This relatively unknown Mission District-dwelling artist, a former pro skateboarder with an unprepossessing demeanor and a scruffy red beard, had the local art community abuzz. I bumped into people outside the gallery on that chilly evening, and more than a few of them offered comments that were shockingly effusive. "I don't think I've ever felt this way at an art opening," a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art employee told me. "I wanted to cry, I thought it was so amazing." But it wasn't just the art world that Evans rocked. "I never go to openings, because the artwork is usually so pretentious," said a friend whose career is in the cutthroat business of chic eateries. "This restores my faith in what art can be."

I had seen a few of Evans's pieces before – humble little drawings and collages that, in the zone of distracted doodlings in the margins of your math book, emulate maps of head space and incorporate texts that express a kind of retiring sentiment about contemporary life. And his solo show was a strong, more elaborate iteration of the same. There were drawings on ruled notebook paper that formed graph charts of contemporary concerns ("work, cancer, play"), a careful collage of 1,000 smiles clipped from color magazines and arranged in loose columns, and a large, hand-drawn map of the world that looked more like an easily walked city with neighborhoods relating to emotional states.

I can't say these pieces brought tears to my eyes, but I was moved enough to be impressed. (Critics!) The overwhelmingly positive responses, however, seemed instructive. What is it about Evans's work that seems to fit the current moment and provide such a direct line to the emotions? Perhaps it's that he uses simple materials such as paper and transparent tape. Or is it that he grapples with the idea of finding some kind of grounding force amid an undeniable backdrop of cultural shift and uncertainty? There's something appealing about seeing the less certain psychic and economic zones of our lives being mapped out on paper, an attempt, however futile, to find a way through the morass of contemporary life. And Evans's show wasn't the only one that captured a picture of our moment.

The decade shows

It's odd to finally be at the point where the 1990s are history, but indeed that Clintonian age of budget surplus and virtual abundance seems long gone as our civil rights, social services, and arts funding vanish and a conservative chill frosts over the land. Our arts institutions over on Third Street – SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – are addressing the recent past in vastly different manners. SFMOMA does it with "Supernova: Art of the 1990s from the Logan Collection" (through May 23), a splashy exhibition that pegs the decade with icons of visual excess and internationalism. The collection's roots – in Kent Logan's fortunes made in the financial sector (and his eventual retreat from that world) – are a fitting subtext to the artwork. The realm of monetary services, with its thrill of seemingly endless stock market dividends and flowing venture capital funds, has given way to a chill of low returns, white-collar crime, and deficits, deficits, deficits. The artwork, however, remains as evidence of style and mind-set.

"Supernova" captures the verve of the era with artwork that pops with bright color, shiny surfaces, and duplicitous messages. Damien Hirst's works, which are well represented in the show, are perfect examples of glamorous decline: a painting of beautiful butterflies trapped forever in vibrant yellow paint, the dazzle of text and color on the shelves of a pharmacy, and of course, the gloss of the cow's head preserved in a transparent tank. Each addresses the moribund realm of mortality with pop panache. The show – whose catalog has a glitter-encrusted cover – is full of works that have recently become classics, some of which are promised gifts to the museum, including Takashi Murakami paintings and sculptures and John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage's candy-hued commentaries on the body. Each of them weighs in with postmodern takes on painting and gender politics. The Young British Artists, perhaps the most hyped art phenomenon of the '90s, were memorialized back in 1996 in Sam Taylor-Wood's Wrecked, a Last Supper cast with members of the YBA. Its reference to art history becomes all the more pointed as a thing of the past.

YBC's "Ten by Twenty" anniversary show (through Jan. 4) counters all the satisfying abundance and flash of "Supernova" with dour scarcity. The layout of the exhibition, meant to celebrate the institution's first decade by highlighting the potentially lively realm of collaboration, enforces an unmistakable sense of emptiness. The show's new works, made by pairs of artists – one of whom has shown in the galleries before and one of whom is a newbie of the first artist's invitation – are humble, sometimes slight, sometimes successful, but they barely fill the roomy galleries. There are vast patches of empty space that suggest something is missing or has been taken away, an atmosphere that drains energy from most of the art on view. The minimal tone is definitely more half empty than half full.

The show's organizers took a chance in banking on new works made especially for the show, and it was an admirable gamble that didn't pay off. While there are a few intriguing works – Nayland Blake and Robert Crouch's video sculptures have a cryptic intrigue, Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Jim Mendiola's pointed takes on ethnic football mascots are humorous and insidious at the same time – others are downright misfires: Carrie Mae Weems and Pamela Vander Zwan's photo sequence on issues of race seems like it was tossed off in an afternoon. YBC's initial mission was to highlight a sense of diversity and community. Those issues have become increasingly integrated into our culture and thus have become more complex. "Ten by Twenty" doesn't bode well for the organization's ability to explore those issues in compelling ways. With that in mind, the engaging toppled-truck sculpture by Barry McGee and Josh Lazcano (originally created for a show in Los Angeles) gets an ironic twist with its positioning at the entrance to the galleries. A sign states that it's not an accident, it's art. If you have to tell people ... Let's hope they can quickly put this one behind them.

Gray matter

The two fall exhibitions at the Wattis Institute at California College of the Arts – which, with some emphasis dropped the final "C," for "crafts," from its moniker over the summer – dealt with doubt in markedly different ways. "Warped Space," a group show organized by Ralph Rugoff, explored a psychedelic notion of tricking the eye and bending reality. Artists such as Jennifer Steinkamp, Evan Holloway, Ricci Albenda, and Rosana Castrillo Diaz used two- and three-dimensional optical tricks to knock viewers from the terra firma of the white gallery cube into buckling aesthetic ground. The show's premise fit the zeitgeist as it tapped into a dual desire to escape and question reality.

In title alone, the Wattis's current show, "The Gray Area: Uncertain Images in Bay Area Photography 1970s to Now" (through Feb. 14), announces curator Matthew Higgs's interest in ambiguous ground. While it looks nothing like "Warped Space," this straightforward, mostly black-and-white photo show plants dozens of artists' images in a framework of vague intent and blurred meaning. This is expressed atmospherically in Todd Hido's recent moody photograph of a vehicle shrouded in a car cover sitting in an environment misted in fog, while Tammy Rae Carland's richly colored view-from-above pictures of empty "Lesbian Beds" only offer clues in folds and rumples of sheets. A 1970s vintage image by Richard Misrach pictures island foliage on Hawaii, to dubious, albeit handsome, effect.

Indeed, it's difficult to know what the artist intends in these cases – a critique of vision, of culture – or what we're meant to take from them. Higgs offers little comfort in the text that accompanies the show: "Truth becomes an elastic category that enters into the realm of fiction, and photography – and the photographic images themselves – become an unstable, shifting, and unsettling terrain." The question then becomes, where does this uncertainty lead us?

Another Bay Area photographer, Reagan Louie, treads into a conceptual and political gray area with his series of images of sex workers in various Asian countries. The glossy, large, color photos sparked controversy and healthy debate during their run at SFMOMA this fall perhaps less because of their sexual content than the ambiguity of the artist's intent. While couched in the realm of self-exploration – the artist attempting to reconcile what he terms an "emasculated cultural position as an Asian American male" – the images didn't exactly present a coherent trajectory. Instead, they raised a multitude of questions about global capitalism, contemporary feminist positions on sex work, and the role of the photographer and his or her relationship to the subject. Fittingly, one of the public programs staged with the show in mind was seemingly titled in the gray area: "Intentionality, Ambiguity, and Truth." It's a triad of concepts that seem to float around each other in constant rotation these days.

With so much uncertainty in the air, it's no wonder some of the more satisfying art experiences of the past year came from artists with solid careers behind them. The career surveys of Bay Area conceptualists Paul Kos and David Ireland, at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California (on display through March 14), respectively, relied on mature artistic foundations built over a few decades. Kos's video and sculpture move from the experiential to areas of political commentary stemming from 1960s radicalism and post-cold war anxiety, two positions that seemed refreshingly defiant in contemporary contexts. Ireland's work, in contrast, does dabble in existential uncertainty and open interpretation, but his consistent practice of following his instincts and burrowing into the history of places to create honey-hued installations goes down like a hearty, grounding meal.