One artist makes drawings based on newspaper photographs. Another explores feelings of emotional and psychological isolation. A third artist searches for spiritual renewal in unusual locations (including a cow pasture and a factory basement), then records the results on film. A fourth artist celebrates the joys of Old Master painting and heavy construction.

Welcome to “Where Are We?,” an engagingly quirky exhibit at the Wheeler School’s Chazan Gallery.

Despite what you might expect from the show’s suggestive-sounding title, this isn’t a ripped-from-the-headlines examination of present-day America, although at least one contributor — Brian O’Malley — has clearly been keeping up with current events. Instead, the show presents the work of four artists whose concerns and interests occasionally overlap (all four share a fascination with the human figure, for example), but who mostly go their separate ways.

For those who keep track of such things, three of the artists featured — photographer Eric Sung, mixed media artist Clara Lieu and painter Julie Gearan — are relatively new to the Providence area. (O’Malley, on the other hand, needs no introduction, having been the director of Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery for more than a decade.)

Certainly, Gearan, a transplanted New Yorker who studied at Indiana University and Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, knows how to make an entrance.

As they approach the gallery, visitors pass by “Knife Sharpener,” a self-portrait showing Gearan dressed in a cook’s smock and wielding a very large chef’s knife. Painted in a style that recalls the work of Dutch artists such as Franz Hals and Jan Steen, it turns the usual artist-viewer relationship on its head: “I’ve got my eye on you,” it seems to say, “so behave!”

Similar mash-ups of old and new can be found in Gearan’s other paintings. The wonderful “Skaters I,” for example, presents viewers with an enigmatic scene — a female skater apparently being violently dragged along by her male partner — that may (or may not) be an homage to mythological seduction tales such as Leda and the Swan. Meanwhile, several other works combine fleshy Old Master nudes with contemporary backdrops (including a number of recognizable Providence landmarks).

If Gearan is the show’s genre-hopping extrovert, Lieu, an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, comes across as the shy, silent type. Her drawings of anonymous bathers standing alone in pools of water have a haunting, almost spectral beauty. At the same time, the lack of detail can make these images of contemporary angst and isolation feel a bit repetitive.

Sung, meanwhile, stages impromptu religious ceremonies in cow pastures, factory buildings and other oddball locations, then photographs the results.

It’s an interesting approach, and at least one of the photos — a picture of Sung himself commemorating victims of Hurricane Katrina — is eerily evocative. But other photographs, including several featuring out-of-focus female nudes, aren’t nearly as effective.

In an artist’s statement, O’Malley describes his latest work as a response to one of the scourges of modern life — namely, the nonstop flow of information that threatens to drown all of us in a sea of (mostly) mindless trivia. The results — a series of small pen-and-ink drawings that chronicle his daily struggle against information overload — aren’t technically perfect. Still, the images, which range from specific people and events (a suave-looking Bernie Madoff, the Apollo moon landing) to most generic “news” images, feel so weirdly familiar as to be part of some kind of collective media unconscious.

bvansicl@projo.com