N.C. Arts Council's exhibit shows works by fellowship recipients

GREENSBORO

It's always instructive to see the exhibitions that the North Carolina Arts Council sponsors every other summer to showcase works by recipients of the council's visual artists' fellowships. These biennial awards -- given to applicants chosen by panels of art professionals -- theoretically go to some of the state's best artists. The shows highlighting their works are typically varied and impressive.

The latest installment of this important exhibit series, consisting of works by 18 recipients of the council's 2008-09 visual artists' fellowships, is on view at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro. For the most part, it lives up to high expectations.

As usual, the artists work in a range of mediums and styles, and deal with different thematic concerns. Their pieces here embody critical and meditative reflections on language, religion, domesticity, American values, the power of nature and the vulnerability of the body, among other concerns. Also worth noting up front is the high level of craftsmanship evident throughout the show.

Painting is in short supply, but the oil-and-acrylic paintings by Kate Kretz (Burlington) are strong enough to compensate for the medium's relative scarcity. Her Fate of a Technicolor Romantic is a tour-de-force -- a detailed, 6-by-8-foot view of a cramped, revealingly cluttered living room in a small house or apartment. The artificially lighted scene is decorated with clashing floral-print fabrics and, on the cheaply paneled walls, a "Little Prince" calendar and a framed picture of a blue-eyed Jesus. Stuffed fabric toy animals are scattered about, and a VHS tape of The Sound of Music plays on a small TV set. Partly hidden in shadow under a chair is a slim book titled A Guide for the Family of the Alcoholic.

This vividly portrayed environment's unseen inhabitant obviously tries hard to insulate herself and to escape, however temporarily, from harsh realities and painful emotions. Kretz deals with the latter more straightforwardly in three equally vivid portraits from her "Man Crying" series, larger-than-life-size heads of young, stubble-faced men apparently overcome with sorrow, as glistening tears stream from their eyes.

Michael Klauke (Cary) also weighs in with a couple of skillfully rendered paintings, but his subject is the printed word and his mode is monocrhomatic. His O.K. Painting, for example, is the abbreviation "o.k." painted in black on white, but distorted as if it were projected onto a concentrically rippled liquid surface. More painstakingly executed are Klauke's small drawings of iconic images and people, including famous politicians, an artist and a rock star. Only at close range can viewers appreciate the fact that each of these drawings is made up of minutely handwritten passages from equally iconic texts. An image of Jackson Pollock making one of his famous drip paintings, for example, is rendered entirely from a passage out of the ultimate avant-garde novel, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. And a portrait of George W. Bush is composed of text from a document detailing information on individual Iraqi civilians killed in the Iraq war.

Equally painstaking in their execution, no doubt, were the show's two vitrine-encased, architecturally referenced assemblages by John W. Ford (Charlotte), from his "House not a Home" series. Among the items incorporated into these precarious-looking, slapdash structures are a set of false teeth, an old tobacco pipe, a toy train, an antique toilet-bowl float and several glass photo slides of famous artworks, all interconnected by balsa-wood frameworks materially reminscent of model-airplane skeletons.

Photography is well-represented by Raymond Grubb (Charlotte), Linda Foard Roberts (Weddington), John Rosenthal (Chapel Hill), David Simonton (Raleigh) and David Spear (Madison). Grubb's grainy, romantic images of Paris evoke a bygone era. The other four photographers employ varied stylistic approaches, but they all four make images that highlight issues related to time's physical impact on people and places.

Sculptural highlights include jazzy abstract clay sculptures by Nikki Blair (Greensboro) and semitransparent cast-glass busts of political leaders by Joe Grant III (Penland).

The only Winston-Salem artist represented among this group of fellowship recipients is filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. Goodbye Solo, his slow-paced but engaging debut feature film, centers on the development of an unlikely friendship between a black Senegalese immigrant cab driver (played by Souleymane Sy Savane) and a depressed, elderly southern white man (Red West). Set mainly in Winston-Salem, the film features nuanced performances and evocative footage of a desolate downtown at night. If you've missed previous Triad screenings of this intimately observed film, you can see it gratis at the Green Hill Center on July 28 at 6:30 p.m.

"The North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship Exhibition" is on view through Aug. 22 at the Green Hill Center for NC Art, in the Greensboro Cultural Center at 200 N. Davie St. For more information, call 333-7460 or visit the website at www.greenhillcenter.org.