Tag: L Ross Gallery

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In the Abstract

Rather than ponder Platonic perfection, Peter Williams’ exhibition of “Recent Works” at Clough-Hanson confronts the world in all its complex, ribald, multicultural, paradoxical glory. You’ll find no vague shadows playing across stone walls in Williams’ 48-by-60-inch painting Plato’s Cave. Instead, stones shape-shift into montages of racial/sexual/cultural prejudice and dysfunction, including pornographic Aunt Jemimas and good-ole-boy sadism. Disembodied heads register awe, surprise, dismay, and horror. 

In Williams’ oil-on-panel portrait Plato, the Greek philosopher looks like a spunky, neurologically damaged street-fighter whose face has been beaten to a pulp on more than one occasion. Instead of meditating on ideals, Williams asks us to embrace the world as it is, to fight the good fight, to struggle to our last breath.

Williams’ bald head and brawny torso are the same color and texture as boulders closing in on him from all sides in his relentlessly honest self-portrait of courage and mortality Dr. NO. His crosshatched, red­-brown loins look like the soil beneath the stones. The lavender sky that backdrops his expressive mahogany face acknowledges life’s profound beauty and pain.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College through March 27th

In Laura Painter Stafford’s exhibition “Presents in Creation” at Perry Nicole Fine Art, dollops of paint become a field of ruby-red flowers in Job 9:10-11. A church’s bright-orange roof, thick stucco facade, and swaying architecture seem to move with the spirit of God in Psalm 68:35.

Instead of feeling stylized or too full of the trappings of religiosity, Stafford’s love of the poetry of thanksgiving in Psalms, her thick paint, and childlike exuberance are powerfully disarming. We feel Stafford’s excitement as she shapes her worlds, her joy as she beholds what she has wrought.

Also on view at Perry Nicole are Rod Moorhead’s provocative pit-fired clay figures. These winged creatures are part fallen angel, part Greek deity, part muse, part temptress. Even as they tumble head-over-heels down the wall in Regret, even as they lose themselves in bittersweet passion in Last Dance with Mary Jane, their soft, searching faces suggest that, whatever their missteps, these creatures will learn from their experiences and move on.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through March 31st

 

In the L Ross show “Ice Hockey Is For Abstract Painters Who Are Tired of Defending Formalism,” Ryan VanderLey explores art history with humor and panache.

VanderLey frees himself from the demands of formalism in Greenberg Was Cut II, creates an abstraction that is both two- and three-dimensional in Neo-plastic Ice, and in Stone Field Was Alright takes one of minimalist Carl Andre’s stones, plants it in a spring-green field, and breaks it wide open with slashes of turquoise and coral that look exotic and floral.

In the space- and mind-bending work I Saw That Stuff Over There, a wooden beam jutting out from the bottom allows us to “virtually” climb into the painting onto a warm brown ledge.

Steady yourself: This artwork becomes increasingly gestural and transparent as VanderLey splinters hockey sticks into expressive de Kooning-esque slashes and turns the ice into thin sheets that hover and glow like Mark Rothko’s fields of color.

Instead of defending particular aesthetic positions, VanderLey incorporates line, form, color, content, and context into playful, philosophical wholes that are some of the freshest, most satisfying works seen this year.

At L Ross Gallery through March 30th

The hypnotic paintings of Susan Maakestad’s exhibition “Traffic Land” at Material were inspired by traffic-camera images retrieved from the Internet. Maakestad’s worlds are composed not of crisp-edged details but boundless space, ceaseless motion, and palettes that look like mixes of oil slicks, soot, night lights, sunrises, and sunsets. 

In Mile Marker 3, we drive a long graceful arc of highway, swerve around a bend, and disappear into a purple-blue twilight. In Mile Marker 4, a broad, teal-green interstate narrows to a needle point beneath a soft-pink sky. And in Maakestad’s particularly haunting Untitled — Night, we drive past a crumbling cement causeway in need of repair toward a gritty halo surrounding a polluted metropolis far in the distance.

At Material through April 10th

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Tough Times

It was one heck of a year for Memphis art. The tougher things got, the more sardonic, surreal, and soul-searching artists became with their works.

Universities, museums, and galleries, also reflective of the times, mounted particularly moving exhibitions. Memphis College of Art’s January exhibition, “Close to Home: African American Folk Art from Memphis Collectors,” featured one of Hawkins Bolden’s untitled scarecrows. Made out of pots drilled full of holes and held together with brooms and frayed fabric, Bolden’s deeply textured testament to life conjured bullet-riddled WWI helmets on top of old wooden crosses and Don Quixote fighting injustice atop a broomstick horse.

For its summer show, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art exhibited 81 of Jacob Lawrence’s prints, including his masterworks, “The Legend of John Brown” series. These spare works were poignantly apropos for challenges we face today. In screenprint No. 1, Christ hangs on the cross back-dropped by what looks like fast-moving storm clouds, the wings of a large raven, or an omen — readings that reminded us that Christ’s crucifixion was a dark drama about government brutality and warring religious factions as well as the hope for redemption. 

“Lichtenstein in Process,” on view through January 17th at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, includes eye-popping, comic-book-inspired collages, etheric landscapes, wry homages to modern masters, and one of the most moving works of Lichtenstein’s career, Collage for the Sower.

Lauren Coulson’s fall show at Jack Robinson Gallery featured photos taken in Europe. By manually winding the black-and-white film in her inexpensive camera, Coulson made multiple exposures of crumbling statues and eroding architecture and clock towers. These blurred and distorted images were powerful portraits not of grand cathedrals or great generals but of time itself.

Jason Miller filled the rest of Jack Robinson’s fall show with kaleidoscopic mixes of digital images that included department-store Santas, Sunday school portraits of Christ, and corporate logos. Initially dizzying, the open-ended symbolism of Miller’s “Energy Fortress Series” and his free-flowing “Digital Mandalas” ultimately celebrated humankind’s ability to cut through corporate spin and childhood fantasy, to embrace what Miller described as “a more open form … where imagination and spirituality outweigh the need to belong to particular religious sects.”

Nine September exhibitions, collectively titled “Greely Myatt: and exactly Twenty Years,” celebrated Myatt’s sly humor and down-home wisdom in venues as varied as the Clough-Hanson Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the P&H Café. In A Brief History of Sculpture at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, soap bubbles spilled down the sides of a worn wooden plinth as Myatt took sculpture off its pedestal and suggested that art, rather than being concise or categorical, is effervescent and ever-changing. For his show at David Lusk Gallery, Myatt carved a wooden beam into a freestanding pair of pants titled Like a Lighthouse, which he mounted on a table. This wry, viscerally compelling sexual icon also served as a poignant symbol for the emptiness and isolation we sometimes feel in spite of the stimuli that flow 24/7 in our wired-up, plugged-in, cyber-spaced world.

John McIntire was at his quirky, cutting-edge best in the nearly seamless syntheses of the cerebral, the spiritual, and the sensual that shaped his female torsos in a November show at Perry Nicole Fine Art.

The most resonant metaphors for 2009 were the brambles and weathered branches that worked their way out of underbrush and crossed a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth in Jeri Ledbetter’s November show of paintings, “Mano a Mano II,” at L Ross Gallery. Charcoal washes coalesced into the death throes of some prehistoric beast in Cielo II. Above the creature, in wild scribbles that arced and jabbed across a piercingly blue sky, we could feel both the artist’s and the ancient beast’s rage for life.

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Grit and Grace

For his David Lusk exhibition “From Peace Mountain,” Don Estes takes
birch plywood, vinyl spackling, paint, plaster, and graphite and
creates artworks that evoke Barnett Newman’s “zips,” Mark Rothko’s
luminous colors, Kasimir Malevich’s blinding whites, and Claude Monet’s
Impressionism synthesized with such originality that the end result is
unequivocally Estes.

Each of the seven horizontal bands that make up Peace Mounain
6 is a work of art unto itself. The bottom of the painting, for
example, is a haunting piece of Impressionism in which a spring-green
spit of land juts into pale-blue water beneath an overcast sky. The
impastoed strip of white at the top is so textured, sculpted, and
incised, we feel the undercurrent of Estes’ thoughts and feelings even
in the painting’s most understated passage.

A black cloud hovers near the top of Three Days on the
Sylamore, and a deep-red line abruptly stops at the center of the
work. These elements suggest not only physical but emotional terrain in
which key memories — dark passages, shared passions, and moments
of joy — are reexperienced as Estes creates his art.

Five of the works in the show represent an entirely new direction in
which Estes draws faint lines across the surface of delicately textured
16-by-16-inch squares of plaster created in clay molds. Estes blows
powdered graphite onto the plaster pieces, washing some of it away,
stroking what remains with bare fingers to create endless variations of
white, off-white, and subtly shadowed surfaces. Day flows into day,
sensation into sensation, structure feels less important, and each
nuance is noted.

At David Lusk through November 25th You’ll find a
full range of female forms in John McIntire’s current exhibition at
Perry Nicole Fine Art, including the svelte hips and full bosom of the
dark-walnut sculpture Henry’s Number One Lady, the milky-white,
triple-jointed marble limbs of Georgia, and the Rubenesque
buttocks in McIntire’s limestone torso titled Sandy.

What makes this show one of McIntire’s strongest are the figures
that are quirky and cutting-edge as well as sensual. What looks like
both an oversized phallus and cranium thrusting up from Sandy‘s
derriere suggests the same energy that impassions the body and the
mind. Breasts on top of buttocks on top of craniums in the marble piece
Teresa look totemic, or she could be the talisman of some
ancient shaman summoning all the power in the universe that he can
imagine. Sky Watcher leans slightly forward as she opens herself
up to the universe. Her iridescent white form and small high breasts
look more ethereal than sensual.

The stair-stepped buttocks and mouth spread across a wide face
topped by two mammoth frontal lobes lets us see Valerie from
several angles simultaneously. Like Picasso’s cubist sculpture and
paintings that were inspired, in part, by the discoveries of quantum
physics and Freud’s research into the unconscious mind, McIntire’s
figures appear to be at the edge of some evolutionary leap. His walnut,
marble, limestone, and bronze female forms express every kind of
yearning and raw energy. At Perry Nicole through November
29th

Across hardscrabble landscapes, in the face of death, in spite of
impermanence and pain, Jeri Ledbetter has created a body of work filled
with boundless possibility and an unbridled zest for life in her L Ross
Gallery exhibition, “Mano a Mano II.”

In Tessier’s Bend II, weathered branches work their way out
of underbrush and cross a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth,
moving toward a pale-blue patch of sky or pool of water searching for
sustenance and light. The incisive blood-red lines in Sugar Ditch
IV suggest life’s brambles can cut to the quick, and the
clarion-red morass of vines and veins in La Palma remind us,
like William Faulkner’s novels, that life is full of sound and
fury.

In one of Ledbetter’s most iconic paintings, Cielo II,
charcoal washes coalesce into what looks like the death throes of some
prehistoric beast. In the wild scribbles of graphite lines that arc and
jab across a piercingly blue sky, we feel both the ancient creature’s
and the artist’s rage for life.

Ledbetter is master of the palimpsest as well as the expressive
line. We see traces of former worlds covered over with broad, thick
swaths of pale-gray paint the artist lays down with gusto. Ledbetter
dismisses her inner critics, banishes the fierce demons guarding the
temple door, and gives herself permission to experiment, to fail, to
start anew, to create works of art that, like life, are complex,
uncertain, and achingly beautiful.

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Saying Something

Showing at L Ross Gallery are works by painter David Comstock and sculptor Bin Gippo, both masters of the fluid line and forms that feel weightless.

Circles loop across Comstock’s large canvases in Positive/Negative, and in Paradox, Gippo’s translucent alabaster sculptures appear to waft in midair. Like the mature work of Isamu Noguchi (the Japanese-American master sculptor with whom Gippo studied in New York), Gippo and Comstock go beyond seamless flow and integrate imperfection and duality into works expressive and complex enough to come alive on canvas and in stone.

A slender polished slab of steatite twists like a sea creature then fills out and arcs back like a graceful torso in Gippo’s From the Sea. The creature’s body is planted in raw stone. In Gippo’s most obviously figurative work, Getting Her Wings, a garden of crystals grows in the arm socket of a delicate and translucent body. Gippo’s torsos are not Venus de Milos forever armless and frozen in time. Her works express, instead, eons of evolution, the urge to expand to grow from sea creatures to humankind to angels-in-training.

Like Gippo, Comstock blurs the boundary between profane and sublime. The edges of Comstock’s circles are frayed; his loops are irregular. He gessoes and sews torn strips of canvas onto his paintings, and soft shades of taupe and beige, which look like earth dissolved in water, wash over many of his works.

A thick black line thrusts up in Positive/Negative 0401 and arcs into a series of irregular ovals that tangle at the top of the painting. A slender thread falls from the tangle to the bottom of the work. From the first rush to the last thread, Comstock is more interested in cycles of life than in idealized flow.

Cloudy Thoughts, by Greely Myatt, near the corner of Madison and Belvedere in Midtown

At L Ross Gallery through April 26th

To see one of the largest and most unusual artworks currently on view in Memphis, go to the corner of Madison and Belvedere and look up. You’ll see 14-by-48 feet of saturate blues (turquoises, thalos, and cadmiums) and wisps of white clouds covering the surface of Greely Myatt’s mixed-media billboard Cloudy Thoughts, one of the temporary projects commemorating the UrbanArt Commission’s 10th year. Metal outlines of speech and thought balloons throw shadows across the work.

Midtowners will tell you how they waited for days for workmen to spell out the idea or product being promoted on the billboard before they began thinking of things to fill the balloons for themselves. Immersed in Myatt’s deep-blue Rorschach, punctuated with clouds and phantom shadows, you can write your own script. Or, better yet, like Myatt, let the words go.

At Madison and Belvedere through the end of May

The Bloom of Your Words Touched Me, by Maysey Craddock

You’ll find several more of Myatt’s unique syntheses of speech balloons, wit, and wisdom at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ “2008 Memphis Flower Show: M3D On the Edge.” The exhibition features artworks paired with exquisite, interpretive floral arrangements by masters from around the country.

In addition to Myatt, the show includes works by some of the most original, sassy, accomplished 3D artists, including Maysey Craddock, Wayne Edge, Joyce Gingold, Terri Jones, Brian Russell, Allison Smith, Carroll Todd, and Ted Faiers.

Craddock’s typewriter keyboard, twisted back and painted deep red in The Bloom of Your Words Touched Me, evokes not only the power of words to endear, incite, or cut to the quick. Surrounded by beautiful floral arrangements, the work begins to resemble a wide-open exotic flower ready to soak up the sun or to snap shut like a Venus flytrap.

Leafless and branchless saplings crowd together in Carroll Todd’s constructed bronze sculpture, Lost in the Woods. An ebony ball is trapped between the slender stakes in a work that points to some starkly beautiful, fierce future in which forests are reduced to toothpicks and the earth reduced to a burned-out orb.

Terri Jones, best known for her elegant and minimal graphite drawings on vellum, contributes several works of conceptual art to “M3D.” In what could be an installation highlighting art as object, Jones shines a single light bulb above an unpadded wooden desk chair. One word, etched into a mirror and reflected on the wall above the chair, brings to mind One and Three Chairs, Joseph Kosuth’s 1970 exploration of the distinctions between reality and representation and between representation and language. Jones’ letters spell out the word “Move” in a work of art that takes us beyond duality to a Zen-like experience that oscillates our point of view between noun and verb, particle and wave, object and idea.

Nine accomplished artists and 52 of their most original, thought-provoking works, together at the same time in the same venue, make “M3D” a must-see show.

At the Dixon: “Memphis Flower Show” April 26th and 27th; “M3D” artworks up through June 1st

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Plant, Animal, Mineral

In her exhibition at Clough-Hanson Gallery, “The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body,” Jillian Conrad leaps from high to low art and from the utilitarian to the metaphysical as she messes with the meaning of art and asks, “What is real?”

In the first moments of viewing Conrad’s Flat Earth Projections, we see every nuance of color, every chasm, every mineral vein of what could be a stone, a mountain face, or a meteor hurling through space before it burns itself out in the atmosphere. As we adjust to the darkness in the small room in which Flat Earth Projections are placed, we realize the crispest, most detailed artworks in the show have no substance. Conrad has magnified pieces of road rubble and projected their images on the wall.

For Horizon Line, Conrad placed a stone on a plywood shelf and then outlined the stone’s shape on the gallery wall. The jagged and soaring lines of Conrad’s elegant drawing remind us that the forms of abstraction, as well as landscape, as well as figuration, derive from nature.

Conrad then takes us inside Oz, three gleaming mountain-shaped panels propped up with wooden scaffolding and stones. With this work, she evokes abstract art’s holiest of holies — flat luminous fields of color — then knocks down the facade by revealing the nuts and bolts of mounting a show.

This is an artist who finds art not in discrete objects or esoteric aesthetics but in the way ideas and objects bounce off one another. So what is art; what is real? Conrad’s elegant, iconoclastic exercises in seeing suggest the answer is simple and unknowable all at once.

“Jillian Conrad: The Solid Matter of a Celestial Body” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through December 5th

“Plants: Interior & Exterior,” Montyshane Gallery’s current exhibition, is not your garden-variety plant show.

Nancy White’s ceramic figure Owed To could be a metaphor for Mother Earth or for the Eve-in-us-all, still in the garden, still intimately connected to life. Eve’s slender green body looks freshly hewn from swamp moss and clay. She sits on the earth looking down; small animals rest on her shoulders; flowers sprout from her womb and limbs.

Melanie Spillman, an artist known for her delicate, sensual watercolors of troubled celebrities, chose flowers as her subject for the show. She paints darkness and grit as well as bright petals as she simulates umber weeds and earth with pigmented Mississippi mud.

Owned To by Nancy White, a work in ‘Plants: Interior & Exterior’ at Montyshane Gallery

With the adeptness of a basket weaver, Marian McKinney works the teals/taupes/turquoises of patinaed copper into complex mosaics. Her five-foot-tall copper Birdfeeders stand at the center of the gallery. Their large sunflower faces bend toward one another like human figures in conversation.

Unlike the proverbial young woman who fades into the woodwork and never gets asked to dance, Bryan Blankenship’s white-on-white Wall Flowers are anything but shy. In many flowering plants, female as well as male reproductive organs are phallic shapes. The pistils and stamens of Blankenship’s white flowers come in all shapes and sizes. They reach out from the center of open-mouthed petals producing sexual energy that is palpable.

Bluebells & Blueboys is Blankenship’s large, mixed-media work of painted and sculpted flowers climbing to the top of a ceramic trellis. The title’s allusions — to Gainsborough’s portrait of an 18th-century youth, an underground magazine, a gay night club, and the beautiful bell-shaped flower — remind us of the wide variety of sexual expression in humans as well as plants.

“Plants: Interior & Exterior” at Montyshane Gallery through December 15th

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit,” the current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, includes some of the most evocative abstractions of Weiss’ career.

The works are on large sheets of aluminum. The pigments, instead of soaking into cotton canvas, stay on the surface of the aluminum, accentuating the mutable, free-floating quality of paint and suggesting the constant flux and the nervous energy of our times. Small saturate patches of thalo blue, cadmium yellow, and scarlet are scattered across muted color fields.

Weiss also scatters scratched and gouged scraps of metal across the picture plane. Unpainted patches of aluminum reflect light. This is not the sunlight of the Impressionists or the luminous color fields of Abstract Expressionism but something more brooding and complex.

When Weiss was a child in Europe during WWII, he made a promise to himself “to create rather than destroy, to give back.” What Weiss gives back now — as the world is once again at war — are portraits of life as compelling as any literal or figurative depiction could be. Here are glimpses into truth, the moments of intense pleasure and pain, the forgetting and the letting go.

“Anton Weiss: Pursuit” at L Ross Gallery through November 30th.

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Something Old, Something New

Adolph Gottlieb: Early Prints,” the current exhibition at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, chronicles a pivotal moment in the history of art. The prints’ titles (Pictograph, Hieroglyph, Omen, Voyage, Aura) tell the story. From 1933 to 1948, the time frame during which these works were created, Gottlieb printed and painted his way through other artists’ styles and the motifs of other cultures and, with the help of surrealism, recorded images from his own dreams and personal visions.

In the 1945 etching Untitled (E # E), two necks grow from each side of an upside-down face whose features have been rearranged by cubist distortion. Whorls morph into waves into phalluses into snakes into fingers. One of these fingers presses into the body of a large fish-like creature whose mouth opens wide with surprise.

In this and many of the other prints in the show, Gottlieb develops an increasingly original, gestural, nonrepresentational style that foreshadows the work of the abstract expressionists (Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline et al.), artists who changed the face of art in this country and around the world.

At AMUM through October 20th

You’ll find the most unsettling, show-stopping symbolism at L Ross Gallery in Margaret Munz-Losch’s exhibition, “Damnatio Memoriae.” An armadillo sits inside a rotting cypress stump in Munz-Losch’s primordial six-foot-tall painting Lullaby: Madonna of the Moss. Instead of her own litter of pups, the armadillo holds an armless human baby whose left eye is milky white. Fire ants march around the infant’s forehead like a crown of thorns.

Adolph Gottlieb image: Adolph and Estther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by Vaga, NY, NY, AEGF #4682P

The armadillo is either cradling or consuming the infant. Both readings are possible in a world where life, death, and decay are inseparable. Saplings grow out of rotting logs; cypress knees thrive in fetid, microbe-rich waters. This work’s subverted religious symbols, swampy environment, and green vines wrapped around cars and a school bus suggest that the lullaby the Madonna/armadillo croons to the infant goes something like this: Neither textbooks nor creeds nor motorized vehicles can deliver us from nature which, ultimately, reclaims everything. The more we try to insulate ourselves inside our books, inside our minds, inside our cars — the more we miss out on life’s raw beauty and power.

At L Ross Gallery through October 27th

Using skills and sensibilities learned from Chinese landscapists and sculptors of miniature stone mountains, Michael Costantini casts lean weathered bronzes whose irregular surfaces look architectural, organic, and geologic. In Perry Nicole Fine Art’s current exhibition, “Michael Costantini,” these evocative totems look like beams of a skyscraper excavated in some distant future, 200-year-old saguaro cacti whose wounds have been faithfully recorded, and/or vertical rock faces blanketed with moss and lichen.

Costantini’s acrylic paintings are also composed of rough-edged, irregular geometries. Scumbled and overlapping blue, beige, and indigo rectangles in The Outer Banks hover and shift like the seas/sands/storms of the coastal community in North Carolina where Costantini lives.

At Perry Nicole through October 29th

Hamlett Dobbins’ abstract paintings are visual shorthands for patterns as simple as the shape of a friend’s head and for processes as complex as the evolution of friendship. In his David Lusk Gallery exhibition, “Every One, Every Day,” Dobbins digs deep into mind and matter and paints what look like shadows moving across mental and physical landscapes, moisture oozing through cellular membranes, the centrifugal force of orbiting planets, and worm holes in facets of light.

Two of the show’s most understated works clearly demonstrate Dobbins’ mastery of color and light and, like much of Dobbins’ art, evoke a synesthetic response. A 3 o’clock sun blazes at the bottom of Untitled (for L.T./G.M.). Alternating layers of transparent yellows and greens turn the canvas into a meadow shot through with light. What looks like a piece of fabric, stained green and gold, billows at the top of the painting. Stand in front of this work, and you’ll feel sun on your body, breezes in your hair.

Two golden diamonds overlap and fill Untitled (for L.T./J.V.T.). At each of the diamond’s tips are small portholes. Like the view through a keyhole in a Dutch masterwork, you’ll see detailed worlds through these portals. Complex patterns of cumulus clouds float through 10 different shades of blue above forested hillsides, crows on pitted stone walls, and meadows covered with grains and grasses.

These small, surprisingly complex scenes demonstrate Dobbins’ skill at landscape as well as abstraction and prove him to be a magician whose sleights of hand and mastery of materials teach us to look, really look, at each scintilla of shape, color, and light.

At David Lusk through October 27th

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Upside Down and Inside Out

In her exhibition “Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery, Edwards’ saturate, surreal paintings take us deep inside memory and the creative process and, along the way, turn some of Baudrillard’s postmodern notions inside out. Instead of viewing representations (what Baudrillard calls “simulacra”) as perversions or pretenses of reality, Edwards welcomes all images as raw materials that feed her imagination.

All color schemes and combinations of high-and-low art are possible in Edwards’ worlds. In Happy Day, an exuberant anthropomorphic mouse stands in front of an orange divan and plastic plant and looks at the painting of a human figure fractured by cubism. In Annunciation, a baby doll with a green face and orange hair stands in a royal-blue room looking out an open window. In Edward Hopper-like fashion, sunlight pours into the otherwise empty room creating a geometric pattern on the wall.

All of Edwards’ art is filled with spirit and anointed with light. With the vintage dolls, cartoon characters, and modernist paintings of her mid-20th-century childhood, Edwards builds highly expressive worlds that suggest what is most “real” is unfettered memory and imagination.

“Beth Edwards: Inside Out” at David Lusk Gallery through September 29th

“NIA: Salon 3,” Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts’ current exhibition, showcases established artists and newcomers in an unsettling, exhilarating group show that depicts the world at a boiling point.

Frank D. Robinson’s mesmerizing installation, Full Support, covers the entire back wall with 21st-century posters and paraphernalia. In the large mixed-media painting, Baby Jesus, Ron Herd creates a mosaic of the hopes/needs/fears that drive us all. Crowns, crosses, and doves are everywhere. Large transparent wings flank Christ’s body. Red flames burn inside him, and his crucified feet cradle an ebony baby with an all-seeing eye.

Ron Herd’s Baby Jesus

A charred lump of clay, dressed in crudely stitched burlap, stands at the end of a road blown into rubble in Dail Chambers’ mixed-media installation Crossroads. While Chambers records what happens when disparate points of view collide, Aundra McCoy’s Spirit Dolls provides hope that the world’s cultures and creeds might find a way to co-exist. McCoy’s beaded and feathered fetishes are filled with spirit all-embracing and all-encompassing enough to weave Middle Eastern, Native-American, and African motifs into one exquisitely beautiful work of art.

“NIA: Salon 3” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through September 29th

Two of the most cogent images in Jonathan McNabb’s exhibition “New Works,” at Eclectic Eye, take us inside a cathedral and an abandoned prison.

In the silver gelatin print, Notre Dame Cathedral, Christ still hangs on the cross near the ceiling but is almost lost in the shadows. Candles burn far below.

In Prison Interior, light pours through the crumbling walls and jail cells of an abandoned correctional institute, where pictures of family members, Hollywood stars, and comedians are still tacked to the walls. The sunlight pouring through empty jail cells brings to mind Christ’s message — more powerfully than the shadowy scene of the crucifixion in a grand cathedral — of stones loosened, tombs emptied, and darkness pierced by light.

“Jonathan McNabb: New Works” at Eclectic Eye through October 3rd

Photo artist Ian Lemmonds is another artist who finds beauty and hope in unexpected places. Five out of eight prints in “Serial Monogamy,” Lemmonds’ current exhibition at L Ross Gallery, consist of piles of Barbie doll legs backdropped by various shades of monochromatic tiles. Light reflecting off the plastic and ceramic surfaces transforms the legs into glowing bouquets. The slender, long-stemmed shapes counterpoint the square tiles on which they lie. Lemmonds captures our attention with body parts placed in obscure settings. As we stand transfixed, searching for metaphor and meaning — is there something titillating, prurient, or brutish about these dismembered limbs? — he surprises us with an experience of beauty that means everything and nothing.

Another untitled print has a similar effect. Two minuscule human figures look at a huge luminous plastic rabbit materializing out of the floor. This is not the radioactive creature that ate New York. Instead, a father hoists his son onto his shoulders to better see the limpid-eyed creature embued with something like hope and the suggestion that beauty and wonder are all around us.

“Serial Monogamy” at L Ross Gallery through September 30th