Kit Rank at McKee Gallery, Sept. 9-Oct. 2 Deborah Everett NYArts Rhythmic and teeming, this interlocking work achieves a high-energy balance within its complex assemblage of patterns. Its clean-edged, graphic elements float and converge like hovering squadrons of bees, in flat, collage-like bits of color. A number of paintings reflect a handling of space and subject matter indebted to Japanese prints, often presenting a hive of adjoining rooms with elegantly robed inhabitants. Playful ambiguity thrives, as decorated panels mimic doors and windows, and portraits pop off walls to lodge in the space occupied by the figures. There is a layered, buoyant quality to these interiors that exists somewhere between the shifting scenery of a stage set and the endlessly branching cubicles of a hall of mirrors. Other pieces reveal equally elaborate social and spatial situations within the contexts of various cultures from the artist's own life experiences. A Mexican kitchen effervesces with the bubbly flow of a fiesta, emphasizing a warm and lilting profusion. Similarly, a Chinese opera scene somehow unites backstage dressing rooms with apparently exterior views of grand buildings, all framed in the lacquer red of pagoda walls. Rank's often ironic observations of human nature introduce an element of tension beneath the surface and counterpoint her joyful immersion in a festival of streetlife and popular culture. Fresh and engagingly direct, this work possesses the immediacy of ethnic and outsider arts, while evincing a solid grounding in the visual languages of multiple artistic traditions. illustrated: Kit Rank, Santa Rosa kitchen- Puebla Mexico, 1998 at McKee Gallery, Sept. 9-Oct. 2