Verdict: Two very different shows hit their marks.

Quilt and assemblages have a lot in common. Both genres are of the hunting, gathering and piecing-together mode. They represent the art of making do, the skill of seeing possibilities and the aesthetic of transforming trash to treasure.

Lillian Blades respects the subtexts of the genres and their connections to Southern outsider art as well as to her ancestry, including West African art and her seamstress mother. The Atlanta artist puts her own stamp on them, actually blending quilts and assemblages in her colorful exhibition at Sandler Hudson Gallery. Her basic move is to cover little boxes of various sizes and shapes with fabric. These are the building blocks of her work. She gives each of the works its own character by the way she arranges the boxes. Their disposition not only determines the outer dimensions of the piece but also the composition within. She plays off shape against shape, pattern against pattern and positive space against negative. The Bahamian-born artist then affixes stuff of all kinds to the surface. You'll find picture frames, decorative elements, spools of thread, baskets, musical instruments and bird cages. She often plays curving forms after the perpendiculars of the boxes.

Although Blades prefers vivid color contrasts, like red and turquoise, "Patterns and Sources #3" is all white, a move that brings up the memory of Louise Nevelson and works to give the piece coherence. In general, the pieces with more elements work better than the spare ones. In the latter, one tends to look at the objects on the surface as disparate things. In the former, one sees them as shapes and textures.

In contrast to the raucous, expansive character of Blades' work, Barbara Schreiber's acrylic drawings on board, shown in the backroom, are small and spare. The shapes in these simplified -- maybe distilled is a better word -- compositions are outlined and filled in with flat, uninflected color. The figures, many of whom are looking down, have no facial features, hence, no expressions.

But the longtime Atlanta artist plays a guerrilla game. Social observations, sometimes ironically funny, roil beneath the surface. Female self-image questions (as in, "do I look fat?"), war and lost innocence and our distance from nature are topics in this show. The downside of civilization is evident in "Dinner in Paradise (Woman with Fish and Spam)," in which the first of a pair of otherwise identical images shows a "native" in a sarong holding a fish, replaced by the Spam in the second. Which would you rather eat?

Some of the pieces are so low-key as to be plain puzzling, but most will elicit a smile of recognition.