One of the sensations conveyed by Christopher Deeton’s richly allusive yet strictly controlled paintings is that of a gradual unfolding. Limiting himself for this show to just two colors—a velvety black and a cayenne-pepper red—the New York-based Deeton created bilaterally symmetrical compositions that seem to open up before you and then envelop you from both sides. Black cactuslike forms rise from the bottom of the paintings while other more slender shapes in black paint suggestive of tendrils swerve out to right and left. Threadlike drips of paint hang from some of these branching elements, as well as from most of the wider, gradually curving frondlike forms that unfurl toward the edges. The drips evoke gestural abstraction; the smoothness of contour and fluidity of line reveal pouring as Deeton’s favored technique.

Housed in a 100-year-old former factory in Minneapolis’s riverside warehouse district, the Soap Factory recalls a vanished industrial heyday with its 11-to-13-foot ceilings, wooden floors, and exposed pipes and patches of brick. It is a compelling space, and offers stiff competition for any installation. The Irish artist Clive Murphy, who is now based in New York, is the first in Soap Factory history (the space opened in 1995) to tackle the entire 12,000 square feet of exhibition space on his own. He is also astute enough to take advantage of his surroundings rather than attempt to distract from their character.

“Displacement,” Mia Feuer’s exhibition of two constructions, occupied—in the threatening sense—the galleries of this North Philadelphia alternative space, which is located in a huge mill building that also features artists’ studios. The entry gallery was nearly blocked by Turnstile (2008), a formidable array of steel poles, turnstiles and overhead sheet-metal boxes, along with diagonal bracing that seemed to serve optical more than structural purposes. With segments of jail-like bars that varied from around 5½ to perhaps 10 feet in height, the work was like a chaotic prison with just a dash of funhouse: as you threaded your way through the temporarily welded structure of maybe a dozen reconfigurable parts, in no place were you actually trapped, although that sensation fleetingly recurred.

Over the last 10 years, Phoenix-based Elisa Johns has developed a lively approach to working in oil that mixes washlike effects with impasto accents. “Bouts of Excess,” her first solo at Walker Contemporary (she previously showed at the Black Dragon Society in Los Angeles), featured six oils, all dated 2008, ranging in size from 26 by 16 to 48 by 72 inches.

Though many of the 14 oil-on-linen paintings (all 2008 or ’09) in “Where There’s Water,” Anne Neely’s third solo exhibition at Lohin Geduld, pay homage to the lakes, tidal inlets and aquifers surrounding her Maine studio, their real subject is paint and the improvisational gusto of its handling. Neely reveals a visceral connection to her subject matter by way of a process that echoes nature’s dynamism, a discourse not dissimilar to that of her contemporary, Joan Snyder. In works ranging from 14 inches to 7 feet across, heavy gestural brushstrokes along with sweeps and scratches of the palette knife activate underlying layers of washes, drips and pours.