A pair of gallery shows offers insights into the search for layers of intriguing surfaces that is the scavenger hunt we often call collage. One show is more old school; the other leans toward a virtual tease.
In the Design District, theres Roberta Marks: Coded Memories at Barbara Gillman Gallery. Marks lives in Key West and France. Her art has been collected by the Smithsonian and by Londons Victoria and Albert Museum. She hews to the time-honored way of making collage by meshing disparate pieces of paper and small objects by hand.
Irene Clouthier: Playground at Marina Kessler Gallery in Wynwood gives a cheeky digital remix on collage. Clouthier, a young Mexican-born artist who lives in Washington, D.C., excels at her own mouse-clicking, virtual version. In neon colors, her scanned images are cut and pasted into a surreal pastiche reflecting a Mexican cityscape and an American toy store, though she makes it a tricky game for the viewer to separate the toys from the city sights.
Clouthiers Playground has a sassy, youthful edge that stops just short of being glib. Her clear-eyed affection for a consumerist cornucopia of plastic comes through with barbed humor, especially in her references to the plastic toys and dolly fashion accessories from Polly Pocket and other Toys 'R' Us brands.
In a digital self-portrait, Clouthier shows herself with plastic yellow hair, cut and pasted from a dolls cartoonish coiffure. In another, her leg models lurid skin presumably plucked from a Pepto-Bismol-pink faux lizard boot.

PUNCHY BILLBOARDS
But its the series sparked by billboard signage in Clouthiers hometown of Monterrey that exerts the most eye-popping punch. She deftly meshes photos of brand-name signage that have the kitschy look of overgrown toys with a zingy backdrop, in which colorful plastic objects such as coasters and gum wrappers adopt abstract forms. A billboard of a white bear looks smaller than bubbly lime-green coasters in this airless, ready-to-snap universe of nonstop plastic.
Her digital photo Boots, dancing with a parade of plastic doll boots, makes her point about the toxic implications of this consumerist love affair with plastic. Boots is the brand name of a popular Mexican cigarette, and Clouthier slyly changes the billboard disclaimer from reading, in Spanish, ''smoking causes cancer'' to ``love causes cancer.''

DISORIENT VIEWER
Both Clouthier and Marks disorient the viewer with a sense of shifting scale and out-of-context objects. But Marks work is by far the quieter and more sober. It is rigorously -- and at times too dutifully -- infused with the spare, evocative lines of Japanese prints and rice-paper screens.

Her collages piece together frail materials that appear to be a few steps from the doorway of dust: stained patches of striped fabric that could be mattress ticking, a tangle of dingy thread, a faded photograph and letter.
In other collages, a scrap of barbed wire functions as both a tough memory of hard-held boundaries and a trim abstract gesture. Its a resolute contrast to the surrounding, melancholy veils of paper and fabric.
Many of these works extol the brevity of the short lines in Japanese haiku, the ability to summon up many images and resonant meaning with a few words.
But some collages fall short of this virtue. They are enervated by nostalgic glimpses at what seems to be fragments from old homes and long-ago lives. Other works linger in the mind as curious, deeply shaded windows onto distilled memories of past loves and losses. In Walking the Path: Chaos, an unchaotic and refined composition focuses on a black shape that recalls an uplifted paddle just before it moves to strike the water. In this collage, Marks calmly clears the way for meditative reflection.

Elisa Turner is the Heralds art critic.