Vigorous Voices: Two galleries on Trade Street are showing works by two quite different local artists

Despite the global financial meltdown and other seemingly insoluble problems on all fronts, art evidently springs eternal. Accordingly, spring's arrival in the Piedmont Triad has brought with it a number of new art shows. Among those that merit special attention are two recently opened exhibitions in the Downtown Arts District that showcase works by two very different local artists with solid reputations for creative ambition and seriousness of purpose.

At 5ive & 40rty

Glenda Wharton, a former member of

the art-department faculty at Winston-Salem State University, showed her work locally with some frequency from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s but has been conspicuously absent from the local scene since then. Her exhibition, on view through April 25 at 5ive & 40rty provides a glimpse of her most recent work. It's titled "The Zo," like the larger project from which the works in it are excerpted.

Central to the project is a hand-drawn, animated film in progress, a portion of which is repeatedly shown on a large flat-screen monitor facing the gallery entrance. This 10-minute excerpt represents about one-third to one-fourth of what Wharton envisions as the finished film, she said at the exhibition's opening. Also on view are animation cells and other drawings of characters and scenes from the film, which Wharton has been working on under the auspices of a graduate fellowship in University of Southern California's film/animation and digital-arts program.

Long preoccupied with fantasy, dreams and semi-autobiographical narrative, Wharton has explored a variety of mediums in developing her idiosyncratic, post-surrealist style. With her foray into old-fashioned, labor-intensive hand animation she seems to have found an ideal medium for dealing with her longstanding concerns.

The Zo is a monster overlord in a "strange wonderland" between "the dream realm and the land of the dead," according to Wharton's summary project notes. The film aims to tell "a story of abuse and escape," in which a child is held captive by the Zo in "a nightmarish yet magical house" containing "room after room of angelic and demonic delights."

The show's drawings include sensitive renderings of the captive child and more cartoonish depictions of other characters -- hybrid entities that variously combine animal, insect and humanoid features, in some cases with mechanical parts. Multiple views of the child protagonist's head -- virtuoso drawings horizontally arrayed in two separate frames -- are the show's most striking images, reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches. More fantastical are drawings of such characters as Tool Boy -- with his medusa-like crown of electrical wires and spiky-looking tools protruding from other parts of his body -- and the pair of dog-headed children in the drawing titled Playroom Cloud.

The film excerpt has a jittery, visually vibratory quality reminiscent of South African artist William Kentridge's animated films. It's creepy, enigmatic and fascinating, and it will be very interesting to see how the seemingly disjointed action is resolved in the final cut. Wharton said she intends to complete the film next year.

At Artworks Gallery

Across the street at Artworks Gallery, Anne Kesler Shields has installed the latest in her continuing series of room-size installations thoughtfully juxtaposing large-format photocopies of imagery culled from historical and contemporary sources, including art history, advertising, world news and celebrity photography. Also on view through April 25, the installation is titled Ambiguities II, following up on Shields' first Ambiguities piece, which she showed at this same venue almost four years ago. The earlier installation consisted of four separate murals whose juxtapositions of appropriated imagery reflected a critical view of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

Ambiguities II is one continuous photocopy mural spread across three walls and made up of 63 individual images or parts of images subdivided into a grid of 93 evenly sized, black-framed panels. Lacking the earlier work's dominant references to the World Trade Center's destruction and the war in Iraq, it presents a more complex, updated critical view of contemporary reality and its historical precedents. It's dominated by religious and/or political imagery, including cathedrals, mosques, portraits of saints and warriors, and crowds of people assembled for religious, military or political purposes. But it also includes a number of images highlighting the human body along with related vulnerabilities and fears.

Shields acknowledges the recent transition of presidential power with a centrally placed image of the vast crowd assembled in Washington for President Obama's inauguration. She has strategically positioned it near an image of the similarly large throngs in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the summer of 1963 for Martin Luther King's public address now known as the "I Have a Dream" speech. Elsewhere in the piece she has juxtaposed relatively contemporary images with carefully chosen artworks from earlier eras.

For example, a 1960s photograph of Muhammad Ali dressed as if for a boxing match but with several arrows piercing his bare torso is played off against Gerritt van Honthorst's depiction of Saint Sebastian, on whose iconic martyrdom the Ali photograph is based. Shields ups the metaphorical ante by including a proximate image of a carved wooden Mangaaka power figure from Africa's Kongo region, whose torso is densely pierced with metal spikes and nails.

Shields' Ambiguities II is a thoughtful meditation on life in a densely interconnected, sometimes violently contentious postmodern world where social, political and moral ambiguities prevail.

■ Glenda Wharton's "The Zo" is on view through April 25 at 5ive & 40rty, 541-A N. Trade St.; for more information, call 724-2474. Anne Kesler Shields' Ambiguities II runs concurrently at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St.; Call 723-5890.