Photo by Garrett Mukai.The Tashiro Kaplan Building was full of people this rainy first Thursday. Zack Bent’s photographs at Gallery4Culture featured his wife and two small boys, often posed as boy scouts. In one portrait, one small boy’s nearly spherical noggin is shown in profile, wearing an elaborate, overdone head bandage.For a slideshow of the evening, look here. More about the art after the jump.At SOIL, a compelling group show features collaborative works by a host of artists. I especially enjoyed Two Mountains Conversing by Vaughn Bell, Jordan Bell, and Jenny Asarnow. Two papery sculptural mountains were suspended from the wall, with speakers underneath playing nature sounds.Jaq Chartier’s color-drenched ink spot panels are on view at Platform Gallery only through this weekend, while Jojo Carvaia’s large scale photographs at Monarch Studio just opened.When you meet someone, see them on the street, you might wonder, what’s their story? These photographs begin to answer these questions, for next to the intense, head-on portraits, the models tell where they are from, where they’re parents are from, and what they believe in. You’ll see more candid portraits of gallery-goers, too, shot last night. At Punch Gallery, it was a Heavy Metal party with a wet tub of PBR, loud music, and brother curators Justin and Jacob Gibbons in matching lederhosen. The art, too, was throwing it’s own Heavy Metal party, with rockin’ our bears, and a Metallica T-shirt painted by Dawn Cerny. The name of the show: Gratuitous Umlaut.Check out G. Gibson Gallery, too, for striking photographs of destroyed working landscapes: Eirik Johnson’s clear cuts and dams of the Pacific Northwest.