By Catherine Fox

For the AJC

Thornton Dial at Bill Lowe Gallery

“Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” a 20-year retrospective of the formidable, self-taught Alabama artist, will open at the High Museum in 2013, but you can see what the octogenarian artist is up to at the Bill Lowe Gallery right now.

The mighty sculptural paintings comprising “Disaster Areas” represent his response to global tribulations, from the tsunami in Japan to Alabama tornadoes whose wreckage he saw with his own eyes.

Dial continues to mine the evocative power of found objects, which aptly suggest the detritus of these disasters in abstract compositions, often painted in limited palette to pull the parts together.

Most of the works are dense accretions of objects and paint, though not as dense as the mid-'90s paintings at the front of the gallery. But he also works in a spare, semi-representational mode. Dial is still on his game.

Through Aug. 27. 1555 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-352-8114, www.lowegallery.com.

Yanique Norman at Sandler Hudson Gallery

Norman has gained notice for surreal graphite drawings which limn --with disarming delicacy and draftsmanship -- images that seemed plucked unmediated from the libido.

The Atlanta artist has taken her work to the next level, introducing new imagery and expanding her techniques in “Middle Passages Redux” at Sandler Hudson Gallery.

This new series has a more overtly racial impetus -- to explore, she says, “the emotional and psychological postures of the black subconscious mind” -- and makes specific reference to African-American history. The result is a compelling emotional directness and metaphorical turn, enhanced by her deft use of collaged photographic figures and gouache, which she exploits to create both veils of diffuse color and opaque marks.

Through Sept. 3. 1009-A Marietta St., Atlanta. 404-817-3300, www.sandlerhudson.com.

Frank Poor at GSU's Welch Gallery

Poor returned to the South after many years away. The handsome, carefully crafted sculptures and works on paper in “Mapping Memory” in the Welch Gallery at his alma mater, Georgia State University, are his response.

At first blush, the vernacular structures -- churches, shotgun houses, farm outbuildings, mom and pop storefronts -- seem awfully close to William Christenberry. Yet, he adds his own fillip to the elegiac depiction of the rural South.

One of his signatures is a nimble interplay between two and three dimensions and between representation and stylization. The surfaces of the structures are covered in inkjet photos of the actual building. The paper is translucent enough to let the knots in the pine veneer or the burnished brown hue of the cherry show through. The images are intentionally not a perfect fit. For instance, trees that would be a distance from the facade are telescoped onto the building.

Adding to this dynamic, the small sculptures cantilever from the wall, positioned as if they were pictures. With the large floor pieces, the front facades are lovingly detailed church architecture, while the rest is just a wooden silhouette. The Potemkin buildings suggest the fading of memory, the demise of rural life and the power of artful suggestion.

Through July 29. 10 Peachtree Center Ave., Atlanta. 404-413-5230, www2.gsu.edu/~wwwgal/index.html.

Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com.