In the Galleries: Sal Randolph and Michael Worful at Gallery Proper

Sal Randolph and Michael Worful The storefront window fronting All Along Press is the site of a new ongoing curatorial initiative by Angela Malchiono, who here brings together two artists who are investigating the way we translate the everyday. The images in Michael Worful's "Hello China" series portray a place at once familiarly quotidian and (to the photographer's eye) decidedly "other": A shopkeeper sits outside his store on a milk crate, his head buried in his folded arms; a woman confronts the lens from behind the Plexiglas and steel of a bench on the subway; the red-painted lips of a cherub-cheeked mannequin echo the hue of the Chinese characters written on an adjacent window — all tableaus familiar to any Westerner, and all radically foreign. Using vinyl lettering as her medium, Sal Randolph offers a perfect complement to Worful's work with her series "My Favorite Words." Stripped of all context, the terms — Just, Refuse, Present, Please, Object — become multifarious, evoking all of their possible connotations at once. Simple, cruel, righteous, gracious, commanding, subtle — the words speak to Worful's commentary on how much and how little we import and export while simultaneously reflecting on their immediate environment, one of the city's most well-trodden and polyglot thoroughfares. Through December 28 at Gallery Proper, 2712 Cherokee Street; 314-827-6185 or www.allalongpress .com. Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat.