Of Fame and Phantasms Trade Street gallery showing works about pop-culture icons; WFU teacher's intriguing studies are on exhibit in High Point

Brian Sieveking resurrects dead American pop-culture icons and sports heroes for portrayal alongside real and mythical beasts, with living-legend celebrities occasionally joining the proceedings. Such imagery is the focus of Sieveking's solo show, "Age of Miracles," at 5ive & 40rty. It has 16 paintings and seven drawings that play with society's propensity for according mythical status to famous entertainers and athletes, especially after they're dead.

In one sparely composed painting a 1960s incarnation of Johnny Cash wears his trademark black suit and holds a guitar across his chest as he stands in an incongruously green desert, seemingly oblivious to the pair of griffons right next to him. One of these winged, lion-bodied creatures appears to be napping while the other rears up aggressively on its hind legs, as if it's about to pounce on Cash.

Sieveking's Playing Possum -- a clever takeoff on John Singleton Copley's 1765 painting Boy with Squirrel -- replaces the boy Copley portrayed sitting at a desk with a pensive-looking Elvis Presley, and the boy's pet squirrel with an opossum.

The show's only literary icon, Edgar Allan Poe, occupies a central position in the largest and most complex painting, measuring about 3 feet square and titled Land of Giants. Flanked by famed American boxer Jack Johnson on one side and country singer Tammy Wynette on the other, Poe stands on a stage toward which several live pigs are plunging head-first from above, in the vicinity of Kentucky Fried Chicken's Colonel Sanders' disembodied head, reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz as it floats at the edge of a rainbow disk in the upper center. The action-packed scene the colonel overlooks also includes a couple of pickup trucks, an alligator, an opossum and a skull-and-crossbones insignia -- a little something for everybody.

Jerry Lee Lewis, epitomizing the idea of a living legend so thoroughly that he might as well be dead, literally plays the devil in Jerry Lee & the Pit. The title references the painting's central image of gaping black hole in the earth -- presumably a portal to hell -- on the edge of which Lewis stands decked out in a fiery red suit in this allegorical portrait. Encircling his feet is a small gold dragon biting its own tail, and suspended in the air above and behind him, a winged devil and its angel counterpart hold up a pink curtain. Meanwhile, in the middle distance, a couple of hairless dogs lie in a green field overrun by stampeding wild boars.

Sieveking's pantheon of American icons also includes Louis Armstrong, James Brown, Ty Cobb, Mahalia Jackson, Robert Johnson, Don Knotts, "Little Richard" Penniman, Bessie Smith, Hank Williams and Johnny Eck, the "half-man" from Todd Browning's film Freaks, among other familiar figures portrayed. The concept is gimmicky, and there's a formulaic quality for a few pieces, but the best ones pay humorously respectful homage, recasting their subjects in settings that are appropriate if sometimes unlikely.

Organic life

Just what is it we're looking at in the works that make up Leigh Ann Hallberg's solo show at the Theatre Art Galleries in High Point?

The seven small drawings in one series look rather like blurrily magnified views of woven threads. More sharply focused imagery in her other drawings includes multi-segmented blobs, fingerlike protrusions and other organically referenced forms, suggesting microscopic views of amoeboid life forms or animal tissue. Two series of oil paintings on semi-transparent Mylar backlit for the exhibition are also reminiscent of micro-organic life, while also evoking bodily fluids. Hallberg teaches in the art department at Wake Forest University and has exhibited her work with some frequency in Winston-Salem over the past 10 or 15 years. Viewers familiar with her previously shown paintings, drawings and sculptures will recognize this exhibit as an extension of her continuing thematic concern with the human body seen or experienced at very close range, even subcutaneously or from internal perspectives.

That theme isn't exactly telegraphed in the exhibition's title, "Dramas & Phantasms," but it's referenced more overtly in the titles of the several interrelated series represented in the show. The drawings that look like woven threads, for example, are from a series titled "Somatic Memories," and the show's other drawings are from Hallberg's "Cellular Dramas" series. The two oil-on-Mylar series -- each consisting of five paintings -- are respectively titled "The Four Humours" and "Cellular Phantasm."

Hallberg's aptitude for traditional illusionistic drawing serves her well in the vividly rendered drawings, which look almost photographic. The more experimental paintings recall both abstract expressionism and the pulsing amoeboid forms of psychedelic light shows.

Unfortunately not included here are any of Hallberg's photo-based works or sculptures, which tend to be more dramatically evocative of the body and its organic life.

■ Brian Sieveking's exhibition "Age of Miracles" is on view through Feb. 29 at 5ive & 40rty, 451-A N. Trade St. For more information, call 336-724-2474.

■ Leigh Ann Hallberg's exhibition "Dramas & Phantasms" is on view through March 29 at the Theatre Art Galleries, 220 E. Commerce Ave., High Point. For more information, call (336) 887-2137.