Galleries: Two shows at Locks illustrate the artistry of chance

When I first heard of the pairing of Ray Metzker and Pat Steir in two one-person shows at Locks Gallery this month and through part of the next, it struck me as a safe decision, a win-win for the gallery.

Having since lingered over both shows, though, I've discovered that the timing of these two exhibitions together offers much more than I'd anticipated: A felicitous opportunity to see the poetry of chance in art-making through two different mediums and sensibilities.

In the downstairs gallery, Metzker's small, quiet, black-and-white photographs of a solitary, often nocturnal Philadelphia of the 1960s and his recent images of reflections of trees on parked cars in this city capture fleeting, anonymous moments forever gone. (Philadelphians who remember their city from the '60s will feel a twinge of nostalgia on seeing Metzker's vintage prints.)

Upstairs, Steir's enormous, majestic, drippy paintings manage to simultaneously stir thoughts of the history of art - from traditional Chinese landscape painting to the "heroic sublime" abstractions of Barnett Newman, no less - and of rain trickling down walls and windows.

Metzker's small silver gelatin prints of Philadelphia in the early 1960s isolate patterns of architecture, or shadows cast by architecture. Often, an anonymous solitary man or woman will interrupt a pattern or become part of it. (In the three images shot in Atlantic City in 1966, three different people are caught walking alone under the same boardwalk and are transformed into living, moving architecture by the patterns of its shadows.)

Metzker's recent, larger silver gelatin prints of the reflections of trees on cars isolate the remarkable distortions that city dwellers pass by every day and rarely notice. So much goes unseen and unaccounted for, you realize, looking at all of Metzker's prints and considering the decades they cover. The point is driven home: One person with an eye, a vision, and a camera can define your surroundings in a way you never experienced them, but with which you sense a familiarity.

The majority of Steir's new paintings are divided vertically and evenly in two, pairing two colors that Steir pours onto the canvas (and each half is a composite of several layers of different colors beneath the final color). All Steir's paintings embody unanticipated results, whether from unforeseen chemical reactions between pigments, varying paint textures, or diverse gravity forces during the application of paint.