Galleries are the plankton of the art world — feeding museum shows, auctions and the frenzy of the art market.

And throughout South Florida, galleries are stepping up to the aesthetic plate. Many of the exhibitions currently on view are resolutely conceptual, dense and/or impenetrable, though they all have visual rewards and, here and there, a chuckle or two.

1310 Gallery

Fort Lauderdale’s 1310 Gallery is in the Sailboat Bend Artist Lofts, a live/work studio complex for artists. The 1310 Gallery is a three-story artist-run gallery, providing ample breathing room for some 44 artists with a bent for exploring gender and identity within the show Appropriated Gender.

Curated by Lisa Rockford, the show addresses issues of objectification, domestic life, sexual stereotypes and even castration: It’s a Trap by Randy Burman consists of 100 mousetraps spread on the floor, each equipped with a tiny plastic penis as bait. Marina Font’s triptych, Domesticated, entails three photographs of a nameless, faceless woman dressed in black, holding domestic standbys like brooms and babies in front of her face.

Carrie Sieh, a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex who is currently exhibiting a piece in the Natural Curiosities show at Miami International Airport, has contributed a photograph of two people of ambiguous sexuality embracing, with embroidered patterns sewn through the paper. She also uses gender-rooted blots of invisible ink — rendered from words like “Woman” and “Father” — to lure viewers into her interactive installation. Gallery-goers can pin their own written thoughts on cards, created by Sieh and opening night visitors, to a diagram of neuron cells, interspersed with gender-specific images of high heels and cowboys. It’s an unusual exploration of gender roles.

Gallery Diet

In Miami, Wynwood’s Gallery Diet has a penchant for the deeply theoretical, and the newest show there — Surface Tension — has all kinds of things going on. The artist, Emmett Moore, has a BFA in furniture design from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work examines the process of construction, the play between surface and structure. Formica and plywood is cut on a slant, revealing layers in the material. Birch plywood panels have acid-trip imagery digitally printed on the surface. A Platonic Coffee Table (Large) is made of Sapele plywood, glass and mirror: the bottom of the diamond-shaped table is open and reveals the floor. On a tour of Surface Tension, Moore pointed to several pieces and noted, “These are exquisite corpses of materials. I don’t know if there’s a connection, but I think they could be friends.”

In the Projects Room at Diet, Moore collaborated with two friends — Chris Johnson, based in London, and Conor Klein, of Brooklyn — on a whimsical show. It includes objects that were created in Miami, such as a cafeteria tray with faux food of Styrofoam, crystals and rubber. For other pieces, such as collages made from magazine ads, the artists mailed materials back and forth to one another, each artist adding something to the work.

Moore seems to be everywhere lately: He does art direction at The Standard Miami and will be working with the hotel on a series of pop-up exhibitions during Art Basel Miami Beach. And, along with artist Consuelo Castaneda, he is creating an environment for Miami Art Museum’s New Work Miami 2013 exhibition, launching during this year’s Art Basel.