A distinctly contemporary sense of gender definitions is notable in two very different shows. Sculptor Diana Moore at Gallery Joe represents women and a quintessentially female object, the purse, in the most stalwart of mediums, carbon steel. At the University City Arts League, David McShane paints professional athletes in surprising but harmonious conjunction with daisy and other flower patterns. The two bodies of work operate differently, not only in medium but compositionally, spatially and in almost every way, yet both affirm gender identification while rebutting obvious stereotypes. It’s refreshing.

People often think McShane's division of images into discreet, contoured areas is based on digitized photography, but he works the abstracted shapes out in his head. They blend neatly at a distance, though they can look strange -- even sinister -- close up. In Ice Capades, a hockey player's eye is represented by a circle centered around a red dot -- very Village of the Damned until you step back and it turns into an adept illusionistic representation. That's a lot of skill and control.

It's fitting that McShane should have an exhibition in October, Mural Arts Month. He uses similar camouflage-like shapes which bend around the edges of objects in his many Philadelphia murals, including Jackie Robinson at 2804 N. Broad St. and a group of jazz musicians at 22nd and Tasker. In his murals, he often combines patterned floral backgrounds or panels with human elements. He does the same thing in these smaller paintings, often leaving broad, clean expanses of white paper or panel.

The flowers are rarely illusionistic but, rather, arbitrary elements in decorative patterns that McShane enjoys pairing with images of sports such as baseball (most popular with McShane), football and hockey. No basketball players, boxers or other athletes are represented. McShane depicts physical effort but not emotions. Why Babe is So Sexy isolates Ruth's slightly ungainly figure in a unique slathering of white paint. Sports fans will no doubt identify close-up views of uniformed torsos: baseball players shown in motion from knees to upper chest. The tight focus on a kind of essentialist masculinity allows McShane to represent action at its center without the distraction of personality that comes through facial features (though I did think I spotted a second image of the Babe's less-than-svelte midsection).

Flower patterns, as well as the stripes and plaids which organize many paintings, might be called "feminine." McShane obviously revels in them and the emphatic, almost psychedelic colors he uses. In Stripes, he places a football-hugging sprinter portrayed in melting caramel hues against a blue-gray, white and yellow daisy field. This, like the other paintings in the series, tends to read as a free association of pleasurable images with no compelling larger purpose. It's a small luxury for a man who spends much of his time executing wall-size paintings for often contentious community groups, and a visually playful respite for the rest of us.

Diana Moore is famous for her larger-than-life representations of women with smooth classical features and perfect athletic bodies. There's one directly in front of the door at Gallery Joe, and gallery proprietor Becky Kerlin says she finds nose smudges on the window of that door when she opens up in the morning. No wonder. This is what a goddess must look like when she assumes a human aspect.

Self-possessed and powerful, the frontal, symmetrical rust-patinaed figure in a long rib-knit dress with pockets is simultaneously ordinary, one of us, and supernaturally graceful. Moore has done a particularly skillful job of representing the hem of the dress, which completely covers the feet and yet undulates with subtle articulation.

There are several very nice small heads in the show and a large oval bronze vessel, Noon, a maquette for one of the oversize vessels Moore is making for the State Department Building in Trenton, N.J. Incised decorations on the surface have links to both art deco and Shang dynasty bronzes.

When songwriters Smokey Robinson and Robert Rogers bragged, "First I look at the purse," did they mean the bank balance or the intimate charms of their girlfriends? Money was the issue, as I recall, but the word can be ambiguous. "Inheritance" is Moore's exhibition title for a group of eight cast metal purses which reflect women's material and physical legacies. The sensuous, symmetrical forms are carefully thought out in terms of surface decoration and shapes that resonate with elements of female anatomy both inside and out.

Each opened purse -- most have latches -- presents a new image with its own symbology of positive and negative shapes. (You can preview them at www.galleryjoe.com, and each purse opens when you click on the image.)

Like the bronze bowl, the purses reveal multiple cultural references. But don't try to casually pick up one of these babies; you aren't going far or fast with a purse of carbon steel. It's a vessel, and a lovely one, but not the "weaker vessel" that the female is sometimes imagined to be.