An antidote to irony at Fraenkel Gallery

Consider Fraenkel’s exhibition “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” an episode in the creative community’s search for antidotes to the cynical strategy and humorless irony that taint much of 21st century art.

The gallery invited one of its artists, Bay Area photographer Katy Grannan, to serve as guest curator, though Fraenkel’s principals took part in the final selection and design of the exhibition.

The signature of many of Grannan’s selections, as of her work, is the sort of tense ambiguity at the core of Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” whose title the exhibition borrows.

The narrative voice of McCullers’ novel, plainspoken as a fairy tale, ranges freely across the confines of subjectivity and context that keep her characters mostly sunk in loneliness and the discomfort of knowing or believing themselves misunderstood by one another.

Elizabeth Bick’s large portrait photograph, “Ela in November” (2013), leaves us wondering whether it was posed or candid, whether the woman it portrays, enveloped in darkness, caught gesturing with eyes closed, is singing, praying, engaged in dialogue or lost in a fugue state.

On the adjacent wall hang several black-and-white photographs by Bryson Rand, two of which exemplify the sort of juxtaposition frequently found in anthology shows at Fraenkel.

Among the pieces most resonant with the themes announced by the title “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” are two mixed-media sculptures — what else to call them? — by the late Judith Scott.

Born with Down syndrome and incapable of explaining anything she did, Scott cocooned seemingly random objects in colored yarn, producing things that exert a sort of primal magnetism on the imagination of those who see them.

With wordless immediacy, they evoke contradictory associations of bondage and shelter from harm, of helplessness, even interment, and complete self-sufficiency.

The three-minute “All Up in Your Bloodstream” (2014) has Miner in jacket and tie, seated facing the camera, looking like a Christian cable news reader — do they exist? — reciting at top speed, without affect, the lyrics of Busta Rhymes’ rap video “Gimme Some More.”

An Exhibition Commemorating Paule Anglim (1923-2015) and Her 50 Years of Collaboration With Artists does not claim to solve the question, but it offers to those who knew her a lively remembrance of Anglim as tastemaker and a history lesson for those not fortunate enough to have tracked for some years her extraordinary record of exhibitions and artistic advocacy.

Hung salon style, encompassing works by artists ranging from Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and George Herms to John Beech, John Zurier, Annabeth Rosen and Clare Rojas, in every medium you can name, and some you can’t, it celebrates the exhibitor’s often underestimated role in art’s reception.