DOWNTOWN

Alice Fellows shows intriguing large-scale canvases of tightly packed, amorphous blades and vines in tropical hues. Shapes encoil and pierce each other with an exuberant sensuality that is at once aggressive and feminine. In two small canvases where blade forms give way to undulating petal shapes, we are reminded of Judy Chicago’s archetypally feminine abstract forms.

The sense of mystery and eroticism intimated in the canvases is manifest in miniature figurative paintings that have heavy dream/subconscious overtones. In the smaller works, Fellows lets us in on the evolution of her abstract vocabulary and its metaphorical content: Fundamentally organic and as life-giving as they are dangerous, coils metamorphose from pulsating veins, to thorny vines, to green serpents twisted around limbs. (Kirk deGooyer Gallery, 1305 Factory Place, to Jan. 27).