JEFF ELROD'S STARKLY GRAPHIC PAINTINGS stem from preliminary drawings he executes on a computer, using a mouse as his pencil to produce scores of rapidly drafted variations on improvised themes. As he draws, he periodically prints iterations in the evolving series that strike him as worthwhile before continuing to add and delete visual data onscreen. From this stockpile of interrelated digital prints, he eventually selects one or two to reproduce, on an enlarged scale, in acrylic on canvas.

Elrod's method grants his work an enviable portability: For this recent show in his native Texas, he had

Like other hard c and r words—culture, curator, critic—career, to my ears, has an ugly ring to it. This seems especially the case when the word is conjoined with such adjectives as artistic or academic, which ideally would resist career’s implication of relentless, purposive momentum. There is solace to be had in the knowledge that, in its verb form at least, career is synonymous with its etymological cousin, careen—“to hurtle with an unsteady motion, to sway from side to side, to lurch.” Careering can be perilous, not least of all to careerists.

“Public Offerings,” an exhibition of “breakthrough

THE SHARPEST PARTS OF LARRY CLARK'S MOVIES are nonnarrative moments of disconnect and strange drift. His 1998 film Another Day in Paradise, for instance, was lackluster except for the opening sequence: a hypnotic, ten-minute stare at skinny, droopy-jeaned Vincent Kartheiser in the act of a heist, which would have made a dazzling film projection on its own, without the ensuing baggage of two hours of narration. And in his latest effort, Bully, a high Mike Pitt frolicks with his dog while Bijou Phillips, a girlfriend on the make, slowly approaches. Clark's movies excel in the photographic, while

DIRK SKREBER'S RECENT WORKS ARE DISASTERS. In the paintings especially, the built environment meets its match in the original expression of the hand of God on a bad day: the flood.

Skreber's paintings romp in the buffer zone between abstraction and representation, engaging in material play that seems less about irony or gee-whiz effects than about expedient ways of laying down color or line at the service of an image. In Untitled (brown flood) (all works 2001), perfect rows of packing tape cover the massive canvas; the slight color variations repeated uniformly in the tape, a by-product of the