If you need a reason to visit the galleries, here are four compelling ones

In the small Alaskan town in which Mary Simpson was born and raised, snow has a muffling effect. It falls fast and often in the dark of winter, bringing cold that creeps into everybody's bones. Light saves itself for summer and runs all night.

Simpson makes monoprints of figures alone or in small groups squeezed by the heavy weight of nothing at all. Her empty space covers the ground and flows upward to obliterate the sky. Besides the skinny old men in antique garb dragging themselves toward some elusive form of home, there's usually a castle in ruins, an empty fort or abandoned village.

The precision of her dense marks and the authority of her ominous, open space isn't all she has to offer. Her isolated figures have a kind of shine. They gleam in their own trickster light, as if waiting till the music starts to make their move.

"Billy in the Lowground" gives Simpson's foul fellows and sly foxes the soundtrack of their dreams. The prints hang beside video screens featuring Portland's Foghorn Stringband, along with dancing feet and open, gesturing hands. Rob Millis wrote the music with its backwoods beat, and Fionn Meade and Simpson produced the video.

Music, prints and video fuse.

What Paul Simon did for LadySmith Black Mambazo, plucking the group from South African obscurity and introducing it to the world stage, Donald Fels would like to do for a group of billboard painters of India. Once responsible for the brilliant, hand-painted signs that festooned India's cities, they now are largely out of work, as PhotoShop images can be had for a fraction of the cost.

"OutSourced" features large enamel-on-metal paintings by masters of India's Godown Studio at Fels' direction. He focused on women from what used to be known as the "untouchable class" and gave them the riveting authority of celebrity superstars.

As he intended, Fels' own abstract paintings pale by comparison. Their tonalities are bleached pastels and the shapes they describe seem to have been inspired by nearly lost, ritualized movement. Small versions on this theme painted on knotted wood work best. Blown up, they slacken, but given narrow confines, they're pretty good, and a few are better than that.

If the gallery had limited Fels to a couple of billboards and a half-dozen of his own little abstractions, this show would have been unforgettable. Packed to the rafters, however, the presentation rebuffs all but the most committed viewer.

Francesca Sundsten is a monster talent in the surrealist Pop tradition. Working in oils or watercolors on anonymous 19th-century photographs, she produces crazed clarities. Her subjects are fetishized emblems of outsider heroics, bobbing and weaving to their own drummers. Her distinction is a dry-eyed, deft fluidity, creating the equivalent of bears with excellent table manners.

There are plenty of artists drawn to this kind of carnival world, but Sundsten leaves nearly all in her wake. It's only her refusal to accept the Pop surrealist tag that cuts her off from her natural audience and prevents her from being an international star. Like her subjects, she prefers to go her way.

Between articulation and blur, Bo Bartlett locates his figurative narratives, all oil on panel. He's a realist with a dreamy bent who likes to posit pictorial fact but unravel it at its edges. The young girl facing us on rocks near the sea ("The Way") could be standing on old brown carpet, worn smooth, and the lace of her pink dress fades in and out of focus. But her eyes, the rose on her dress and the sea behind her are lucidity itself.

Bartlett is not above a joke. "Intelligent design" is a small painting of a director's chair, minus the director. Bartlett recently moved to Seattle and lives on Vashon Island. These paintings reflect his new environment. "Father and Son" are caught at bottom edge of a painting's frame, son riding on his father's shoulders as the Space Needle towers above them.

Bartlett likes to paint women on the Vashon ferry, their hair slightly mussed, their cheeks pink as they rise to prominence as the only vertical in a horizontal world, boat rail extending beyond the frame and the sea going on forever.

He's drawn to the tender but avoids the corny. Some impulse pulls him back, even as he paints wings sprouting from the tiny shoulders of little girls. Maybe what saves him are his tightly orchestrated colors, saturations that flow from the specific to the general and bind them together.

His bravest painting here is the large "Au Martin." It represents a move away from William Beckman's clear-sightedness to Odd Nerdrum's lugubrious drama. Bartlett can enter Nerdrum's territory without covering himself in Nerdrum's gloomy mud.

Three figures have their backs to us in "Au Martin," a barefoot woman in a straitjacket and two men in suits who appear to be giving her the bum's rush over a cliff. All three are caught in the rhythm of the scene and move on a diagonal, like dancers in a nightmare.

Bartlett demands belief in a scene he insists on undermining. The feet of these figures are dissolving like ocean spray, which somehow makes the tableau more haunting.

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