IN "Fluttersuckers," Chris Finley presents a series of riddles that play with the ambivalence of words and images as both meaningful and nonsensical. The show's title joins the titles of two paintings, Moths (which flutter) and Ticks (which suck), based on photographs of eight members of President George W. Bush's cabinet and a photograph of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, respectively. Finley has digitally abstracted the contours of his subjects' faces, manipulated the results, and painted the final product. The paintings are swirling studies of color and line that look remotely like bugs. Are they portraits? Portraying Bush's cabinet as moths might be an allegory for its members, who hover over the world like moths before a flame – unable to resist a temptation that threatens to destroy them. And the depiction of Walton as a tick might be another political allegory referring to how his company has been sued by a group of immigrant workers who charge that they've been exploited. However, other untitled drawings created in the same way are based on images of Dr. Laura, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King, among others, and seem to involve no specific commentary on them. Moths and Ticks may be only abstractions with meaningless names – mere fluttersuckers. In the show's titular piece, a school of fantastical, winged fish is poised on the verge of gobbling rows of lures built with small wooden balls, silver paint, orange dots, and gray strands of Finley's hair. At the bottom of the piece dangle lists of numbers cut out of the phone book, which include a word riddle for viewers to figure out. In LORD Slug, Finley has collaged enlarged cutouts from the San Francisco phone book of names with obscene, absurd, or otherwise potentially embarrassing connotations (including "BLOWER B," "LOSER John C," "YACKER Fawn," and "FAR T") – using words to construct an image and further exploring the confluence of meaning and absurdity. The works in the show draw upon a broad diversity of techniques, which threatens it internally with incoherence, while at the same time, intersecting points hold the exhibit together as Finley complicates the boundaries between representational, abstract, and conceptual art. Between sense and nonsense, the show left me wondering: what exactly is he up to? Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 77 Geary, S.F. (415) 982-3292. (Clark Buckner)