Agnes Martin meets Carl Andre meets Sean Scully. That’s the best way I can describe the work of Polly Lanning Sparrow’s show Sleeper up at Barry Whistler. Her plywood floor pieces employ Andre’s methods of linear or stacked arrangements of parts, but unlike Andre’s austere arrangements, Ms. Sparrow’s work builds relationships between parts with blocks of color similar to Scully’s, but more spare. Her piece Red Configuration #2 is both leaned against the wall and stacked on the floor — narrow slats partly painted red lean against wider ones on the wall with a large unpainted piece of birch plywood anchoring the set. Against the wall the arrangement seems architectural, certain pieces jutting up above the others and creating a kind of cityscape. The narrow stack of partly painted wood on the floor pushes the landscape further by adding an angular dimension at the foreground, playing with perspective.

The floor piece Blue Cofiguration reads like an abstract map, but also like text, the blocky blue shapes referencing letters and topographies. There’s the desire, when looking at it, to decode the shapes, however fruitless it proves.

The two sets of four gouche paintings by Ms. Sparrow, each called Untitled, ache with the restrained simplicity of Agnes Martin’s graphite and white paintings. These small works of Ms. Sparrow’s show painted white bars on brown paper. The bars seem barely there, but make the eye adjust to work out the patterns she’s laid down. And while these pieces, and every other, could be arranged in any number of ways, the artist has landed on the way that feels most satisfaying. They suggest that Ms. Sparrow’s work is largely intuitive, relying on a sense of things to push the work into some order, and believing that what’s latent in both herself and her material will be revealed and exponentially increased through each arrangement.

Leslie Wilkes is also playing with pattern in her show called Sequels in the small gallery at Barry Whistler. She’s employed a 1970’s graphic design pattern to render fourteen unique paintings all based on the same pattern. The result is a wall full of trippy, masterfully articulated new patterns which smack beautifully of the decorative in kaleidescopic bursts and pulses. Each is a sequeal to the orginal pattern and each finds its own personlality within the limits of the original design, pointing to the infinite number of new designs that could come from the first. It’s a confounding and imaginative way to talk about a great number of things, not least of which is how one person’s particular imagination works upon another’s. Like Ms. Sparrow’s work, Ms. Wilkes’ elicites a degree of satisfaction in the viewer that’s bound up both in the presented thing and its sheer possibility.

Polly Lanning Sparrow: Sleeper
Leslie Wilkes: Sequels
Barry Whistler Gallery through August 1