Drawing on Psychology

The fundamental medium of drawing is the common denominator among three artists' solo exhibitions at Wake Forest University's Hanes Art Gallery. These shows stand out favorably at a moment when strong work is in conspicuously short supply in local exhibition venues.

One of the three artists, Jenny Scobel of New York, relies on photographic sources for her near-life-size mixed-media portraits of men, women and children, including anonymous and widely recognizable individuals. These chromatically muted, composite portraits are rendered primarily in graphite on wax-coated wood panels and enhanced with oil paint. Scobel's mixing and matching of heads and bodies from different sources yields a subtly disjointed effect, particularly in some cases. Set in cityscapes and intimate domestic settings, these portraits all convey a sense of psychological tension.

The woman wearing a black dress in Scobel's Dancing is a doppelganger of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy (later Onassis), and her posture indicates that she could be dancing or gesturing. But the airborne black birds crowding the gray sky -- calling to mind Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds -- raise the possibility that she's fleeing.

Scobel depicts actor Gene Hackman -- at least a man with his head -- alongside an unhappy-looking, dark-haired girl wearing a black coat and holding a straw hat in a double-portrait whose title, Valentine's Day, hints at a possibly illicit, age-inappropriate relationship.

Rune Olsen, a Norwegian artist, uses newspaper and masking tape to create provocative, life-size sculptures of people and animals, then draws expressively on their surfaces and finishes them with eerie-looking glass mannequin eyes modeled after his own. His figures are posed and otherwise presented in ways that suggest violent interaction or convulsive transformation. In one untitled piece, a two-headed, fang-baring snake appears to rise up off the gallery floor aiming to strike. And in For Everything I Long To Do, a sculpture suspended from the gallery ceiling, Olsen depicts a nude, dreadlock-haired woman contorted in agony or ecstasy as she's ravaged by an octopus.

Some of the works in Atlanta artist Craig Dongoski's "Durations" series incorporate appropriated images, such as Chairman Mao's "little red book" and a cross-sectioned human body from a medical illustration collaged into Duration: Red Book. But these plywood-panel pieces are dominated by, and in some cases completely given over to, organic-looking abstract forms composed of concentric black oil-pencil lines, apparent visual riffs on the whorls of their exposed wood-grain surfaces. Dongoski's printed statement relating the "Durations" pieces to "geological time and sound waves" is less than crystal clear, but the drawings are visually engaging -- psychedelic even in the absence of lurid colors.

Dongoski's show also includes video-documentation and drawings from his Drawing Voices project, a collaboration in which Wake Forest art students made drawings inspired by the amplified sounds of drawing instruments on paper surfaces, digitally transmitted from Georgia State University, where other students were simultaneously drawing.

Body-referenced art

As in the Wake Forest shows, the human body is central to much of the art in "Embodiment," a group exhibition at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art that is much larger, and more substantial, than anything now on view in Winston-Salem. Its nine artists take highly varied approaches in depicting or alluding to the human body.

Of particular interest are Cort Savage's sculptures, labor-intensively made of human bones and black rubber bands. Savage's installation Scattered Man consists of all the bones from a human male skeleton, each separately wrapped with enough rubber bands to form a sphere around the bone. The 214 variously sized spheres are scattered on the floor in a random configuration that calls to mind atomic particles or celestial bodies in space. Each of Savage's three smaller pedestal sculptures, also made of rubber-band-wrapped bones, is accompanied by a corresponding, lightbox-displayed X-ray image.

Also especially noteworthy are works by Holly Fischer and Kate Kretz. Fischer's white-stoneware pedestal sculptures take references to voluptuous women's bodies into the realm of baroque abstraction. Kretz's painstakingly embroidered pieces fuse Victorian and surrealist sensibilities in referencing the body and its functions. Among her contributions to the show are pillows whose cases are adorned with images intricately embroidered from human hair, and a striking wall piece, Heart Center, in the form of a heart surrounded by a dense network of blue and red blood vessels.

"Embodiment" also includes photographs by Carolyn DeMeritt and Ellen Giamportone; sculptural works by Nikki Blair, Heea Crownfield and Mary Tuma; and metal "Neckpieces" by Margaret Yaukey.

Solo exhibitions by Jenny Scobel, Rune Olsen and Craig Dongoski are on view through March 28 at the Hanes Art Gallery in Wake Forest University's Scales Fine Arts Center. The gallery will be closed today as the university's spring break draws to a close but will resume its regular schedule tomorrow. For more information, call 758-5795.

"Embodiment" is on view through March 26 at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, 200 North Davie St. in the Greensboro Cultural Center, Greensboro. For more information, call 333-7460 or visit
www.greenhillcenter.org.