"Martin Mull: Works on Paper" and "Tara Tucker: Friend and Foe"

Mull, better known for his comedy than his paint-by-numbers style of art, lifts and combines images from magazines of the 1950s and '60s to comment on American life and his own past. But he is at his best when he resists the urge to cut and paste. The New Refrigerator, Sickroom, and Unfinished Business are straight-on copies of family photographs in subtle monochrome and are little masterpieces. Painter and Art in America are witty self-portraits. Taken literally, Tara Tucker's hyper-real drawings of animal-botanical cross breeds suggest what happens when genetic engineering goes wrong. Jack rabbits have extra legs, orchids take root in kiwis, and snapping dogs live in trees. Delicate feathers, tufted fur, horny beaks, and scaley feet are all rendered in perfect strokes. But these drawings are strange. The violence is pushed, the sweetness disturbing. It feels as if Tucker is throwing down challenges, commenting on how we inhabit our environment: how it plagues us, how we abuse it, and how we abuse each other. The only sculpture is a family of long-haired "Forest" sheep, who wander a table-top, the roots of gnarled trees coiled in their wool, branches rising over their heads. They are lost sheep — unable to see the forest for the trees on their backs. —L.F.