Check Out The Interesting Shows At Downtown's Bero And Raw Galleries. By Margaret Regan FOR THE THIRD time in three years, Gordon Stettinius has put work from his "photographic diary" on display at Bero Gallery in downtown Tucson. A former Tucsonan who's now based in Minneapolis, Stettinius shows a new suite of 26 photographs, mostly soft-edged, sepia-toned works bathed in shadows and light. The pictures veer from magical, even weird, staged images--like the stuffed antelope head in a baby stroller in "Antelope Buggy"--to luminous family portraits that are many steps above the standard snapshot. What's interesting is that the family life pictures inform the mystifying ones, and vice versa. For instance, "Dinosaurs" is a creepy collection of monsters, shot to loom largely and ominously in the foreground of the picture. But these threatening giants are children's toys, plastic castoffs from the family nursery. Similarly, a "Plywood Angel," perhaps lifted from the family's or a neighbor's cache of Christmas ornaments, is photographed floating eerily in a murky sky. In both cases, with a Rod Serling sensibility, Stettinius has zeroed in on the overlay of the macabre in contemporary daily life. Then, taking the other tack, Stettinius injects his family portraits with a sense of the strange. In "Walker, New Orleans," a swaddled baby, very much alive, lies among tombstones, a bouquet of flowers resting on his blankets. Again, in "Walker in Cemetery," Stettinius poses his young son in a graveyard, this time sitting him upright in front of a row of dilapidated grave markers. The healthy baby effectively becomes a symbolic counterpoint of life to the death around him, but by no stretch of the imagination is this your usual baby photo. Even Walker looks a little puzzled. If there's a theme at all to this loosely organized chronicle of the photographer's days, it would the be gestation, birth and first year of this child, whose mother is Robyn McDaniels, a former Tucson photographer who used to go by the name Stoutenburg. (McDaniels, still working as a photographer in Minneapolis, was originally scheduled to show her work at Bero with Stettinius, but plans fell through.) Some of Stettinius' images of their child are simply lovely. "Walker in Wirth Park" is a reprise of the famous Gene Smith picture of his two children walking off through the forest into the light. In a twist, Stettinius pictures his son toddling through a sunny meadow toward the dark forest. "Walker on Sun Temple Mound, Natchez, Miss." again drenches the child in light. This time, he's a tiny figure asleep in the grass under the sheltering branches of a grove of trees. And for those who followed the legal ordeal of McDaniels and her family three years ago over "Oscar with Chicken," a photo of her older son that was confiscated by Tucson Police on the flimsy grounds that it was kiddie porn (the case never even made it to the grand jury), Stettinius provides the reassuring "Oscar on Bike." In this all-American outdoor shot, Oscar, now grown into a plucky schoolboy, vigorously plows his bike into the muddy shore of a lake. But Stettinius couldn't resist injecting a little bit of wicked wit into this wholesome family scenario. For "Down Home," shot late in McDaniels' pregnancy with Walker, he gussied himself up as a sleazy guy, complete with greasy hair backcombed over a bald head, leering at the swelling naked belly. The birth is recorded in an odd shot of the nurse gleefully holding aloft the bloody placenta. These pictures, surely pioneers in their eccentric view of reproduction, go right along with his gleeful transvestite ("Drag Queen"), his re-invention of the unfortunate transformed hero of Metamorphosis ("Cockroach, After Kafka") and his vision of his own grave: It pictures his two bare feet upright against a grave marked "Gordon." Next door at Raw Gallery, painter Doug Weber shares Stettinius' quirkiness, if not his aesthetic skill. Weber is a Prescott painter who delights in fauvist colors, savage strokes and art world jokes. His solo show The Last Retablo: A Fresh Look at Old Ideas features about a dozen works, mostly oils on canvas, with a few woodcuts and watercolors thrown in. Weber does indeed tackle some old art ideas. There's his "Nude de Jour," a brightly colored female languorously reclining á la Goya's Maja. She's here in the Southwest on a sunny patio, but still she's a stand-in for every classic painter's obligatory nude. "Welcome to France" is a funny lampooning of the old art capital, with two fetching Frenchies in striped jerseys and berets welcoming an artist flying in on his own wings, palette and brush in hand. Not all of Weber's "fresh looks" are so fresh though. "All Roads Lead to Rome" is an embarrassing potpourri of classical motifs, a hodgepodge set in what looks like the Roman Forum. "Noble Savage" is a re-do of German expressionism, and "Fancy Paints" reprises Picasso's tired harlequins, which were tired even when Picasso did them. Weber does have the raw energy expected of this feisty little gallery, but he'd be better off putting it to more original use. His Mexican-inspired retablo paintings suggest he ought to look closer to home. Slapped into rough plywood frames carved into fantastic shapes, these are interesting reworkings of religious icon and popular myth, of madonnas and machos. Gordon Stettinius: Recent Photographic Work continues through April 5 at Bero Gallery, 41 S. Sixth Ave. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, during Thursday Art Walk and Downtown Saturday Nights. For more information call 792-0313. Doug Weber's The Last Retablo: A Fresh Look at Old Ideas continues through April 5 at Raw Gallery, 43 S. Sixth Ave. Hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, during Thursday Art Walk and Downtown Saturday Night. For more information call 882-6927.

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