Boston-based painter Civitarese must have a smidgen of Minnesota native in his background, given his love of big skies and watery landscapes. Widely recognized and admired nationally, the artist makes his Minneapolis debut at Circa Gallery with a show of 13 large-scale landscapes shimmering with pale light. By mixing waxy pigments into oil, he is able to glaze his canvases with transparent layers of soft color. His almost abstract paintings are more memories of landscape than observed places, although Civitarese has a special affinity for marshland, seascapes, clouds, mist and other atmospheric effects. (Free opening reception 6- 9 p.m. Saturday 02/02.)

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Camille Gage is the rare rabble-rouser who prefers grace and eloquence over anger and proselytizing. Stylish and tasteful, her recent series at the Form + Content Gallery, "War, Redacted," took the high road in critiquing our government's grotesque blunders in Iraq, focusing on loss and absence instead of propaganda shock and gore (Gage's slyly altered military photographs situated flag-draped coffins in darkened and dreamy subconscious spaces). Next month at F+C, she teams with poet Juliet Patterson for another loss-based think piece. "The Presence of Loss," an evolving, community-based installation, includes ghostly paintings of fossils and extinct species, a poetry reading and a 5-by-20-foot "textual quilt" made from tiny slips of paper, each bearing a single word representing something lost by an individual ("confidence," "faith," "Chapstick") and something lost by the community at large ("innocence," "identity," "fraternity"). (Free opening reception 7-9 p.m. Saturday 02/02.)

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