'Meat, Donuts, and Guns' and 'Cultural Quarantine (Part Two)'
Through Feb. 21, Southern Exposure

IT'S EITHER REASSURING or unnerving to know magazine ads have always dressed up real life as something glamorously false, even the outdoor sporting and game-hunting mags of 50 years ago. James Gouldthorpe's watercolors in "Meat, Donuts, and Guns" are all excerpts from these types of vintage publications, rearranged according to his own logic and sense of irony. In one sequence an Airstream trailer breezes through the woods. Its occupants stop for a break, shoot some game, and chomp some snack cakes. Another series shows human hands holding dead game by the feet, pointing to the functionality of death in the rural world and the subtle strangeness of regarding it as sport. A large portion of one gallery wall features row after row of painted cuts of meat. It's definitely less gory than the butcher section at the supermarket, but by allowing his colors to drip down the paper, Gouldthorpe evokes the blood and body fluids that plastic wrap usually shields us from. Also showing at Southern Exposure are James Harbison's "Peanuts," the Sixth Street Photography Workshop's "Tenderloin Portraits," and Packard Jennings's "Cultural Quarantine (Part Two)." Jennings's work is mostly political; Terrorist Alert is a wooden sign modeled after the fire danger-status warnings at national parks, but instead of "high" and "low," the inserts read "fictitious," "exaggerated," and "pineapple," mixing dadaist nonsense with pointed satire. Jennings has also constructed a room in the gallery where visitors can sit in the dark and listen to a cacophony of radio talk shows. The chatter is more lulling than maddening, but that's almost certainly his intent – to point out the sameness of what's on the airwaves and to ask whether it's informing us or rocking us to sleep in blissful ignorance. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 401 Alabama, S.F. (415) 863-2141. (Lindsey Westbrook)