Show Instead of Tell Show of works by teachers at city's five colleges and universities worth a visit to two of the galleries in the Sawtooth Building

Although not often described as a college town, Winston-Salem is home to five colleges and universities. All of them offer formal instruction in visual art, and over the years their teaching artists have contributed significantly to the city's strong cultural reputation.

In recognition of this, the Arts Council has organized an invitational show of works by 21 artists who teach at those schools. Because they're all within five miles of each other, the show is titled "FIVE Schools/FIVE Miles." Curated by art historian John Hallmark Neff, a former director of Reynolda House, this generally strong, diverse selection of works is on view through March 1 at the Sawtooth Building.

On the traditional end of the show's conceptual spectrum are variations on landscape and still-life imagery. John Hutton (Salem College), for example, is represented by small, rather delicately expressionistic gouaches depicting landscapes in the western United States and the ruins of a Greek Apollonian temple.

The familiar Moravian architecture of Old Salem is the subject of three color photographs -- images that emphasize rusticity and evoke nostalgia -- by Marty Marion (Forsyth Technical Community College).

In a related vein are Salem College art professor Kimberly Varnadoe's small Polaroid-derived images of 1950s-vintage motel signs in Tucumcari, N.M., and art professor Bob Knott's (Wake Forest University) more metaphorically resonant color photos of clotheslines and air-drying clothes against romantically weathered architectural backdrops in Venice.

John Pickel (Wake Forest) plays on still-life and botanical-illustration traditions in his three small color photos from a series titled "Botanical Dissection," close-up views of fresh flowers being dismantled and readied for display with stainless steel knives, pins and tweezers.

Duncan Lewis (Salem) takes a similar approach to ornithological imagery in two large-format color photos. His Feathereye is a tight close-up of a freshly killed bird enveloped by loose feathers, and the three photos that make up his Ribtriptych are x-ray-like close-up views of a bird's skeleton. Lewis also has two small sculptures on view.

William Booth Taylor (N.C. School of the Arts) takes a more impressionistic approach to nature-based imagery in the nine photos that make up his piece haunted by nostalgia. In some cases blurred or viewed in near-microscopic close-ups, these color-saturated images of trees, moths and less readily identifiable subjects verge on abstraction.

The strategy that Sharon Lee Hart (Wake Forest) effectively employs in her two pieces -- the show's most interesting photo-based works -- is a digital variation of photomontage. In The Spectators, she combines several different images to create a creepy, goggle-eyed mask with a manually subdued alligator emerging from its wide-open mouth.

Against the ominously dark backdrop of her panoramic Cut-to-Fit, fragments of printed text are superimposed on images of variously attired women posed with symbolically evocative objects, including a rifle, a barbell, a mirror and a fold-out fan.

The previously discussed works are exhibited together in the Davis Gallery, as are other two-dimensional pieces by Pam Griffin (Salem), Leigh Ann Hallberg (Wake Forest), Alix Hitchcock (Wake Forest) and Charles McClennahan (Winston-Salem State).

The larger Rhodes Gallery, meanwhile, is visually dominated by four large sculptures that are among the show's best efforts. Three of them are industrially referenced pieces by Greg Shelnutt (NCSA), who collaborated with Greensboro sculptor Mark Brown to create two of them.

The one Shelnutt produced on his own, Home Fires, comments amusingly on the increasingly tenuous character of American domestic life. It incorporates a small patch of grass surrounded by a white picket fence implanted atop a four-wheeled block of concrete, as well as a miniature house whose roof is lifted up to reveal chunks of raw coal, indicating its function as a "Secure Home Grill™," as Shelnutt identifies it in an accompanying statement, which mimics promotional jargon.

David Finn (Wake Forest) created the fourth large sculpture, Sticks and Stones, in which the ordinary materials named in the title are interconnected like Tinkertoys. The sticks in this piece are studded with cutout copper leaves, each incised with a different word or phrase -- such as "visions," "thought," "broken treaty," and (more enigmatically) "smothered piano." They're reminiscent of the texts imprinted on tiny panels mass-produced as refrigerator magnets for use in composing modular poetry.

Other highlights in the Rhodes Gallery are pieces by WSSU art professors Scott Betz and Leo Morrisey. Betz is represented by five uniformly small cardboard boxes imprinted with images and texts indicating that they contain mass-produced dolls based on contemporary citizens and government officials in Iraq.

Morrisey has appropriated ordinary objects as conceptualist comments on homelessness in his installation on the Rhodes Gallery's central column. One of these objects is a ragged panel of box cardboard on which he has scrawled the offer, "Will work for wall space." The wall labels accompanying this piece, and two small containers designated for "tips" specify percentages of monetary proceeds generated by these works to be distributed to panhandlers or to charities.

Other pieces in the Rhodes Gallery worth mentioning are by Sharif Bey (WSSU), Roy Carter (Wake Forest), David Faber (Wake Forest), Sharon Hardin (Salem) and Thomas Tucker (WSSU).

■ "FIVE Schools/FIVE Miles" is on view through March 1 in the Rhodes and Davis galleries at the Sawtooth Building, 226 S. Marshall St. There will be a reception for the artists at the Sawtooth on Feb. 1 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. For more information, call 336-722-2585.