In her San Francisco exhibition as part of SF MOMA's "New Work" series, Mai-Thu Perret employs a language of symbols to refer to a private world, a society of her own invention. The range of her influences is wide and the materials are refined but still somewhat roughly constructed when necessary, for example in Sylvania, the faceless papier-mache figure who is contrastingly adorned in a couture dress inspired by wood grain and raising her arms in adoration and celebration, possibly of the very textures that she bears on her body and in her namesake. Piles and clumps of vaguely recognizable forms are cast in glossy ceramic, and the shimmering wallpaper quotes a Russian constructivist textile pattern. Here, Perret interrogates the issue of patriarchal authority with the thread of an invented narrative that runs through the entire exhibit and her poly-vocal body of work, including other work not on display here.

Mai-Thu Perret, Sylvania, 2006; steel, wire, papier-mâché, acrylic, gouache, and wig; dress by Susanne Zangerl, Zürich, with custom fabric from Forster Rohner, St. Gallen; 220 x 135 x 60 cm

The Crystal Frontier is a text that Perret has been creating in conjunction with her visual art for the past decade, and it takes multiple forms (song lyrics, diary entries, letters, imagined schedules) to describe the fictional feminist community New Ponderosa Year Zero. Their mission was motivated by the belief (noted in an accompanying pamphlet at the exhibition) that a "truly non-patriarchal social organization had to be built from the ground up, starting with a core group of women who would have to learn how to be self-sufficient before being able to include men in the community." This group of sculptural work together with several excerpts from The Crystal Frontier manages to conjure very specific past moments in recent art history while re-casting them into a futuristic visual language, the sum of these parts shaping up into a cryptic and intriguing whole. Angular, cleanly constructed crystalline structures with reflective surfaces serve both to open up the room and to point to the viewer as both subject and object (your own image captured in the glistening surface, you may recall the myth of Narcissus as well as the Lacanian notion of the image as a "trap for the gaze," before turning back to the exhibition).

Mai-Thu Perret, South of the river, it's a tangerine; north of the river, it's an orange, 2008; glazed ceramic, 19 11/16 x 15 3/8 x 11 in.

These post-minimalist monoliths add yet another few layers of mythology to the exhibit and its range of deeply femininized effects. The work is complicated by various modes of text and subtext that figure as integral to Perret's subversive practice; as text it includes The Crystal Frontier and as subtext the practice of subversion is directly implicit in the titles of each work. Often the titles of works refer to a difference in language and the generation of our cultural signifiers. For example, with South Of The River It's a Tangerine, North Of The River It's an Orange Perret seems interested in the disparity that defines a culture and ones' own identity. Wall text reads that some of her titles are taken from Zen koans and speak to the longing for oneness of nature and humanity. Undoubtedly, it is a worthwhile gesture to imagine the merging of humans once more with their earthly surroundings, as Perret has done with the invention of this fictional land and its setting in somewhat nihilistically termed "Year Zero."

She takes her cues from generations of writers dealing with the utopian literary model and it is unsurprising to read that she has a degree in literature from Cambridge University. But what can the viewer unravel from this densely encoded story of idealism and self-sufficiency, at the cost of legibility? How are we meant to stand within the context of a utopian society imagined richly by such diverse means, or are we meant to be shut out by the level of construction which has already taken place in such an imagined world? To stand inside or outside the limits of New Ponderosa Year Zero, to bring ourselves into the story and breach that frontier, may be asking too much of the work.

For a project more firmly rooted in reality, Emily Jacir's Where We Come From arrives at SF MOMA at an especially meaningful time. The limits of our individual perceptions and experiences are unfortunately founded in political and economic realities that are by and large inescapable. Jacir made it her purpose with this two-year project, begun in 2001, to begin an inquiry of stunning simplicity and sensitivity. The question was posed to numerous individuals living around the world but mainly of Palestinian identification, "If I could do anything for you in Palestine, what would it be?" The artist uses her personal freedoms (and this word is chosen with great hesitation, given that it has taken such an ugly tone in the past few years) as a U.S. passport-holding individual and resident of both New York and Ramallah to produce a series of documentations of herself living out the desires of others.

Emily Jacir, Where We Come From (detail), 2001-2003.

Clearly presented, Jacir takes into her own hands an issue of generosity--and in her two years fulfilling the wishes of others, repeatedly makes one of the most gracious gestures you can make as an artist and indeed as a human being. She crosses the red tape and innumerable borders and boundaries to pay phone bills for Palestinians under Israeli control. She takes pleasure in the regional cuisine and sweets of Palestine, eating specific treats from specific shops remembered fondly by her surrogates in this project. She spends a day enjoying Jerusalem freely in place of a man named Osama who is forbidden entry. This small room at SF MOMA held for a brief moment the possibility of how the most basic request could represent a bridge across just some of the impossible chasms put in place by thousands of years of territorial battle, a battle that continues to be waged with renewed passion this winter.

All of this work speaks to the desire for a connective experience between humans and the places we call home, a desire that manifests in our interactions with others and with our environments at large. Perret seems to point to the deeply human need for re-evaluating our intentions and our idols as a civilization, and a need for starting over--the impetus for a revolution that has been staged within the fictional construct of her text The Crystal Frontier. For Jacir the revolution is obviously staged in the willingness to literally cross boundaries for perfect strangers. Shaun O'Dell, another artist showing in San Francisco right now, casts us once more presently into our own mental landscapes and all the while appears to be wrestling with many of the same questions as Jacir and Perret, questions about our own personal histories and myths, mistakes, missteps, constructions and inventions--in general, the Order of things.

Shaun O'Dell, Where It Came From, 2008.

O'Dell, in his two-room multi-media installation at Jack Hanley Gallery, is dealing with the questions of how we relate to our environment and man's place within the ever-shifting phenomena of nature. To begin, the artist is looking at political tensions in Iran over natural resources and how the games we play as diplomatic forces in the world are eroding and destroying the energy of the planet in more ways than simply the most obvious, in our dependence upon foreign means. Far from a didactic presentation on conservation of resources, O'Dell's installation at Jack Hanley employs a complex logic and a similarly vast range of sources to speak about the personal psychic landscape in relation to the world at large. The forms, like Perret's, quote from a distinctly minimalist vocabulary--a simple gold square painted on white paper is an elegant addition to the spare arrangement of sculptural and image-based elements in one gallery. Two of the forms in this space are giant cubes of earthen material: clay, dirt, sand, cement, etc., all lined up with a black square and white outline of another circle on the top wall to create a somewhat catchy optical illusion when viewed from the front of the gallery, a move that at first seemed to reference some Gordon Matta-Clark project, just before the chainsaw digs in. The two crumbling forms have each had removed from them a cone-shaped piece which is not visible anywhere in the gallery. As with the optical illusion on the back wall that continues up onto the ceiling, this room seems to rely on a particular zone of perception and phenomenological enchantment that would send Michael Fried reeling.

Shaun O'Dell, The Gold, 2008.

There is a distinct tensile strength to most of the material, which does not feel at all tangential to the subject of O'Dell's narrative...he is describing a world that is infinitely fragile but massive in scope. The viewers are glimpsing the work of someone who sees things truly falling apart more than they're being rebuilt, reinforced or put back together. Like Perret's private utopian vision, O'Dell's work seems bent on deploying its own logic to its own means, which adds up to a complex system of visual language and has a similar gesturing towards obscure or even hermetic interests. But this universe of O'Dell's feels very much more out-there than in-here. He is interested in the real facts of the world, and in the relationships we all have to each other and how this impacts us energetically. Emily Jacir's work does not feel unrelated either, in its compassionate and humanistic voice, which questions power and the limits of the law that exist for all of us in different ways.

As well as dealing with systems of power, O'Dell is touching on a relationship to another system we all share and for which he has great veneration--the solar system. Past projects include sustainable energy proposals and organized talks revolving around cultural production, art and power, and art in a disassociated world, and past drawings have had more figurative reference but still a great deal of abstracted sun-worship. The images he has made for the current show are much less literal than in recent years though, still referencing the myths we build in our lives and speaking about our personal heroes as an American people, but now there is a deepening of reverence for the natural world and all of its gifts. These works seem to draw from the visual vocabulary of a Native American or an astronomer, who has constructed a deep conviction for his own belief system and who may be beginning to worship the non-humans in his world the most.

How are we meant to decode such private abstractions from an artist who seems outside of his own time? One gets the sense that the work has so many things to say about the history of itself that you could spend hours in just one painting, dealing with all of the twists and turns of loosely-constructed narrative and painstakingly rendered worlds, all the dense masses of totems, layers of collage and striated meandering angular combustions. Piles of references are heaped on, nods to quilting, folk art, theoretical physics, planetary exploration, sonic arrangements, biblical tales and a marginalized belief system based on the teachings of ancient prophet Zoroaster. The subjects to which this art refers begin to seem boundless; the work feels so cosmologically inclined that one may intuit its roots include, well, everything--if it were a research text it may number into the tens of thousands of pages. O'Dell has the confidence in his own wandering logic and, more than that, faith in his beliefs which are extolled to his audience with remarkably pleasing, if perplexing, visual effect. This begets, in time spent with the work, a distinct impression: the wonderment and the generosity of the artist, as jumbled as the text may be that he gives us to read.

New Work: Mai-Thu Perret is on view at SF MOMA through March 1st. Emily Jacir's Where We Come From (also at SF MOMA) is part of the exhibition Passageworks: Contemporary Art from the Collection and is on view through January 19th. Shaun O'Dell: Sound From a Rock is on view at Jack Hanley Gallery through January 24th.