Ballad of murder unfolds in drawings

Every day, we Americans experience a disconnect between crime and entertainment. On television, stories of missing wives and girls, cross-country chases, and high school sharpshooters are told in dramatized news programs, complete with morose music to suit the particular outrage - and then they're imitated on shows like

Law and Order

. The stories and their knock-offs are becoming so similar it's hard to tell the difference.

Rob Matthew's series of graphite drawings at Gallery Joe tells a familiar archetype of horrific story, but his tale unfolds slowly and mournfully, decidedly unlike the evening news, or prime time. His model of storytelling is the ballad, using his paper and pencil in place of a guitar.

The narrative of Knoxville Girl, which was loosely inspired by the murder of a young woman in that city, is reminiscent of that of the Fishtown teens who lured a friend to his death. (Others might recall an earlier version of a similar story, of the privileged but troubled New York kids who stabbed and eviscerated a homeless man in Central Park.)

What we're shown in Knoxville Girl, though - and what no one would likely ever see in real life, and probably not even on TV - is the act of murder, including the time before and after it occurred (all in pencil-on-paper, of course). This denouement, as drawn in 14 scenes, is the product of Matthews' imagination, but Matthews' fastidious drawings look as if they're based on photographs or stills from a film. The randomness and pointlessness of this murder of one young woman by another, as told by Matthews, is less shocking than pathetic and sad. This story shows the murderer collapse in a revelation of the horror of her act.

Matthews' individual portraits of the victim (as alive), the cold-blooded female assailant, and her two male sidekicks, depict these four as the self-possessed types you imagine they'd like to be perceived as, and add to the ballad-like, Wild West character of his series.

Marilyn Holsing, who is having her first show with Gallery Joe, has set off her charming gouache paintings of the young Marie Antoinette at play by transforming the gallery's Vault space into an 18th-century French sitting room replete with embroidered benches, toile curtains, and other period aristocratic ornamentation.

Though I understand the temptation, I'm not sure Holsing's paintings benefit from their over-the-top accoutrements. Their sweetness and innocence would have been nicely offset by the claustrophobic, unadorned Vault.

Most of Fleisher/Ollman is given over to the work of Felipe Jesus Consalvos, the Cuban-born artist who supported himself as a cigar roller and lived in Miami, New York and, finally, in Philadelphia, where he died in the 1950s or 1960s. His exquisite, complex collages - his own highly developed answer to the vernacular cigar-band collage - were discovered in a West Philadelphia garage sale in 1980.

The artist's second solo show, of newly released works from his estate, includes many more of his eye-popping compositions, on paper as well as on violins and other objects. This is an artist who clearly never rested, and we're the luckier for it.

The contrast between Matthews and Holsing at Gallery Joe pales next to the one between Consalvos and Marcy Hermansader, a Vermont-based contemporary artist who is exhibiting collages she made in response to the Iraq war.

Each of Hermansader's solemn works is an organic or geometric shape built up from fingertip-size pieces of torn paper, into which she's set a small pencil drawing based on her cropping of a newspaper photograph of the Iraq war. Together with their respective shapes, Hermansader's drawn images, which depict the face and shoulders of an Iraqi man lying in bed, a medic, a grieving Iraqi woman, and others, suggest the visual equivalent of eulogies.