Greg Gossel in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO—Minneapolis-based artist Greg Gossel makes colorful, explosive collages filled with pop culture imagery. His works are a mash-up of pictures from the modern American lexicon — 1950s and ’60s comic book femme fatales, Pinocchio, Fat Albert, the Confederate flag, Sitting Bull — and make use of a wide variety of materials — acrylic, screen print, marker, paint pen, correction fluid, graphite, and spray paint on canvas. In each work, Gossel takes one figure as his centerpiece — in his latest series, mainly crying comic book heroines — and pastes jagged scraps of printed material on and around it, adding graffitied words on top. The resulting collage appears almost like flames, cutting into the figure and threatening to subsume her.

Gossel’s art depicts an American society steeped in images and other visual stimuli, nearly to the point of chaos. His methods work best when he sets up unexpected comparisons, as in Shower Scene, which positions Sitting Bull next to a crying femme fatale. With the collage seeming to encroach upon the two figures, the work draws a connection between the way women and Native Americans have been oppressed in American society.

Undoubtedly, Gossel is indebted to the Brooklyn-based street-art collective Faile, but his work distinguishes itself with its bright colors and emotional nature. In addition, it lacks the humor and irony prevalent in Faile’s; it is more earnest, and feels more resolutely political.

Gossel’s fourth solo show, “Make Believe,” runs through July 7 at the Shooting Gallery in San Francisco. Here are the artist’s picks for other shows to see around town this weekend:

1. Sylvia Ji at White Walls Gallery, through July 5

2. Matthew Palladino at Park Life Gallery, through July 13

3. Amanda Smith: Candy Garden and Sparkling Sabers at Jack Fischer Gallery, through June 28