January Splendor in the Galleries

Could there be a better way to welcome in the New Year than with the resurfacing of a nearly lost work by the famously elusive, highly publicized English graffiti artist/activist Banksy?

Legend has it that in 2010, the man of mystery painted six pieces in San Francisco, only two of which remain. One of them, whose former home was the side of a Victorian building, is "Haight Street Rat," the spitting image of a rodent gamely sporting a revolutionary's beret and clutching a large paint pen in its little mitts. Ripped from the wall and later rescued from oblivion before it was about to be painted over, the big rat makes a triumphant return to the city, where it will be displayed in the window of 836M, a non-commercial art gallery. (Jan. 21-July 11)

"It's My Job to Be a Girl," an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Zak Smith, and photos, watercolors and oil paintings by William T. Vollmann, may have the catchiest title of the year. Vollmann, a macho war correspondent and prolific novelist, initially began dressing up as a woman to enhance his understanding of the psychology of his female characters, though these "performances" went beyond mere research and led to his construction of a chubby alter ego he christened Dolores, portrayed here in various guises and mediums. ("The Book of Dolores," a collection of paintings and photographs of her, was published last year.) Identifying with the feminine and the erotic, the outcast and disdained, his visual art, shown for the first time in a gallery show, features self-portraits of the artist exploring various aspects of femininity and the murky terrain of gender. He also has photographed and painted compassionate images of the prostitutes he encountered in combat zones and brothels while working on his journalism and fiction projects. Zak Smith, known for portraits of his friends in the porn industry, is also partial to sex workers as subjects in his intricate, cartoonish, comic book-styled paintings and small-scale, detail-packed ink-on-paper artworks such as the 193-piece series Drawings Made from Around the Time I Became a Porn Star. (Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Jan. 24-Mar. 7)?

Sly humor coupled with incongruous, discomfiting subject matter is a through-line in the work of Jennie Ottinger. That goes for her new show "Letters to the Predator" at Johansson Projects, where the San Francisco artist has devised an amoral animal kingdom a long way from Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. In an array of oil paintings, humans and their fellow creatures, all carnality and instinct, perform unwholesome scenarios that play out in stadiums and public arenas like the not-so-child-friendly carnival/circus scenes "Snake Wrestler," where a naked fellow stage-manages his asps; or "Jump Rope," which depicts a trained bear standing on two legs in the center ring as grotesque spectators leer in the peanut gallery. In "Lions Attack," a perturbed displaced king of the jungle growls at what appears to be a slave auction hawking naked white and black men in front of a crowd; and in "Orangutans," a cabal of apes lounges in a cage while humans gape at them, but wait - have the tables turned, with the apes as jailers, and the humans behind bars? It's hard to tell. "Watching exploitation is predatory," explains Ottinger, who's intrigued by social hierarchies and group dynamics. "I wanted to portray people asserting their power and the different things that change the dynamics: Nudity and the audience being most interesting to me." Also in the show: Soft sculptures of disfigured toy animals. Thrift-store cast-offs that have been cut-up and collaged, they resemble sinister sock puppets that have gone a few rounds with a bigger dog. (Through Feb. 28)

Difficult to look at and impossible to turn away from, Aftermath, San Francisco photographer Kerry Mansfield's documentation of her two-year journey from her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2005 when she was 31, and subsequent treatment that included chemo and a mastectomy, through her reconstructive surgery, is a tough sell and an important record of human experience. Creating the photographic imagery she searched for but wasn't available to her at the time, and intent on producing a visual resource for others, she bared her scarred body and wounded soul in a series of nude self-portraits shot against the same sterile tile background. The pictures show her starting out as an apparently healthy woman with long, wavy blond hair and both breasts, and moving through the process that left her bald, a result of the life-saving treatment that seems like slash-and-burn medieval torture. For now, though, it's the best we've got. (SF Camerawork, through Jan. 24)

Wondering what to do with those stacks of old New York Times and Artforum magazines crowding you out of your abode? Francesca Pastine has put them to imaginative use, skillfully slicing, dicing and reconstructing them for Totem, her solo show at Eleanor Harwood Gallery. Wielding an X-acto knife, she cut into copies of the magazine, an arts-and-culture bible born in San Francisco, inverting, skewering and appropriating iconography of the art establishment - Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman are but two unwitting participants in her "unsolicited collaborations" - to form masks, totemic figures and subversive commentary. In an accompanying body of work, Pastine applied silver leaf to the New York Times financial pages, which she then cut, folded and shaped into masks that she photographed, producing an effect suggesting archaeological relics. (Through Feb. 21)