In the photograph used on the museum handout for Laura McPhee’s recent exhibition, smoky rays of sunlight stream into dense forest as fire licks at the roots of trees in the center of the frame. In the foreground, more sunlight illuminates underbrush while branches to the upper right and left almost touch the lens, creating a path for the eye that seems to lead a hundred feet deep. The highly theatrical composition resembles nothing so much as a picture by Gregory Crewdson, and when one realizes that Understory Flareups, Fourth of July Creek, Valley Road Wildfire, Custer County, Idaho, 2005, is

After five years of painting on guitars and two and a half years of portraying musicians, Boston’s Joe Wardwell staged his own rock/art “concert” of sorts. The artist paired his new raucous, romantic oil paintings and the elegant drawings that make up his “A Heavy History,” 2006, with a handpainted electric guitar finished in gold leaf and a vintage phonograph playing his latest vinyl album, Full Length, 2006, which showcases his rasping, guttural voice, booming bass-playing and drumming, and boisterous guitar riffing.

“A Heavy History,” a series of sixty-nine small sepia-toned pencil-and-ink