Exhibit showcases works from 6 Raleigh galleries

GREENSBORO -- For its summer exhibition "Gallery Nomads," the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art invited six galleries in Raleigh to showcase selections of works by artists from their respective "stables." On view at the center through Aug. 29, the resulting exhibition is reminiscent of a contemporary-art fair, a series of mini-


exhibitions by different galleries in a single location.

Separate areas of the center's exhibition space have been designated for the different Raleigh galleries (one of which is actually a collaboratively operated artists' studio). The setup highlights the diversity of the art typically to be seen in the state capital.

On the more conservative end of the show's broad stylistic and thematic spectrum are Adam Cave Fine Art and Flanders Art Gallery. Landscape imagery is evidently the specialty of Adam Cave Fine Art. The most compelling works in its section of the show are Donald Furst's small, dark, densely rendered drawings, which suggest nighttime views of wooded landscapes and architectural exteriors. A related sense of shadowy mystery pervades Diana Bloomfield's photographs of identifiably southern landscapes including a swamp, a coastal marsh and a field of kudzu. Also from Adam Cave are Susan Baehmann's old-fashioned-looking landscape images etched on richly multi-hued paper and Joseph Cave's pastel-hued paintings of racehorses and sailboats, which suggest large-scale paint-by-numbers panoramas.

Flanders specializes in craft-based art and other work that treats nature imagery. Its offerings include Megan Casey's earth-toned wall reliefs; Jessica Baker's images of tree leaves etched on real leaves; and Jeffrey Kaller's bone-like ceramic sculptures, reminiscent of eroded beach detritus. Also from Flanders are Jenny Eggleston, who makes fussily delicate drawings referencing plants and other organic forms, and Lia Newman, whose mixed-media sculptures look like dried entrails strung from the ceiling to dry.

For its part of the exhibition, Artspace offers a mini-solo show by Megan Sullivan, a fiber artist currently working in the private, rent-free studio that Artspace has provided her for six months under its ongoing residency program. At the Green Hill Center, she is exhibiting several works that overtly reference painting through their employment of stretched canvases. Instead of painting on them, she has stitched unfinished-looking scenes of beagles roaming in bucolic landscapes on her larger canvases, while she has sewn clusters of finger-like decoratively patterned fabric protuberances onto the smaller ones. The two types of work -- one restrained, the other more exuberant -- play off each other here.

Contemporary advertising strategies are employed by several of the 24 artists from Design Box, each represented by a piece created in response to President Obama's inauguration. Highlights include Andre Leon Gray's The Audacity of Victory (an entirely black-on-black, flag-like portrait of Obama over the slogan "BLACK PRESIDENT"); political-cartoon-style works by Adam Capps and Marc Russo; and an 8-by-8-foot portrait of Obama by John Williams and Rob Ruchte, in the form of a multicolored Post-it-note grid. (The latter piece, 64 Square Feet of Hope, is based on the image of Obama used by artist Shepard Fairey for his iconic "HOPE" campaign posters.)

Not all of the Obama-related pieces are celebratory. Scott McClure pointedly indicates a political equivalence between Obama and George W. Bush in his poster print digitally fusing respective halves of their faces into a single visage, emblazoned over which, in brackets, appears the title's one-word question Change?. And Paul Friedrich satirizes the idealization of Obama in his Obama and 7-Up Rainbow, an image of the happy-faced president enthroned in the clouds under a cartoon rainbow, fluttering birds and an airborne unicorn -- all rendered as if by a precocious child imitating Peter Max.

The exhibition's most varied selection of art under a single umbrella is from Bonded Llama Studios. Among its offerings, Lori Belk's photorealist painting of a young woman would look fairly at home with the work from Adam Cave Fine Art, and Anne Marie Kennedy's works made from pressed botanical specimens would be in appropriate company in Flanders Gallery's display. Bonded Llama's cartoon-influenced paintings by Daniel Eichenberger and Kennedy, on the other hand, would fit in nicely with the exhibit's offerings from the Visual Art Exchange (VAE).

The latter gallery's appealingly rambunctious contribution to the show indicates an aesthetic incorporating neo-pop art, so-called lowbrow art and graffiti. The two highlights from VAE are collaborative pieces -- one a densely composed, wildly colored mural-style painting of demented-looking cartoon characters clambering among balloon-style graffiti lettering and radiant stars; the other an assemblage of grungy, scavenged materials configured in the shape of a North Carolina map. The untitled painting, on an adjoined pair of portable wall panels, is by Joseph Giampino, Sean Kernick, Victor Knight III, Matt Scofield and Ben Tuttle. The big assemblage map -- whose centerpiece is a battered old prosthetic leg -- is titled Fallen Flag, and it's the work of Parail, as Mathew Curan, Joseph Giampino and Derek Toomes collectively bill themselves.

Other highlights in VAE's section of the show are Garrett Scale's three tight close-up paintings of Boris Karloff's face made up as Frankenstein's monster, and a couple of small paintings by Matt Scofield, including one delicately rendered scene (Mission Accomplished) in which a silhouetted graffiti writer with a backpack likely full of spray-paint cans walks unhurriedly away from a freight-train car stopped on a railroad track.

■ "Gallery Nomads" is on view through Aug. 29 at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, at 200 N. Davie St. in the Greensboro Cultural Center. For more information, call 333-7460 or visit www.greenhillcenter.org