NO THEME: 'Dimensions 2010' show offers some interesting pieces, but nothing that is truly cutting-edge

As usual, there's no particular theme for the latest annual jurored show in Associated Artists of Winston-Salem's "Dimensions" series, but it turns out to consist largely of two-dimensional, figure-based art, with numerous references to architecture.

"Dimensions 2010," on view in the organization's Fourth Street gallery through May 21, is made up of 76 works by 73 artists, all but 12 of whom are from in-state. As the show's guest juror, Robert Lange -- an art instructor and gallery owner from Charleston, S.C. -- selected these works from more than 400 digital images that 113 artists entered in a nationally advertised competition. Don't expect any cutting-edge pieces, but there are at least a few that merit a close look, if not a special trip to the gallery.

Among these highlights are several photographs, including two brightly sunlit color images of young girls, displayed as a pair. In one of them, Sarah-Marie Land's Lilley, a girl of maybe 6, wearing a school uniform and a precociously wise, impassive expression, leans nonchalantly against a child's desk/chair unit. In the adjacent Angelina, by Andrea Land (sister of Sarah-Marie Land), a girl of about the same age--barefoot and wearing a shapeless dress, a bonnet and a creepy child-face mask (shades of Cindy Sherman) -- slumps on the floor of an all-white bedroom. As critical responses to conventional imagery of innocent-looking children, both photos reflect what seems to be a fairly widespread preoccupation among contemporary photographers.

Diana Greene probably used a slow shutter speed to create the blurry effect that imparts a dreamlike quality to Waking, her photograph of a nightgown-clad woman sitting up in an old iron-frame bed alongside a portable electric fan on the sill of a sunlit, open window. It's an effective image in its evocation of the psychologically transitional moments after a deep sleep, on re-entry into the world of ordinary consciousness.

Among the show's more timely works is Andrew Goliszek's photograph of the splintered ruins of a demolished Textile Mill whose smokestack rises against the pale sky in the background. It's not only a good photograph but also a fitting symbol of the financial and psychological wreckage left in the wake of the textile industry's post-NAFTA abandonment of the Southeast and other parts of the United States.

Owing a substantial stylistic debt to photography is Gargoyle, Demetrios Balderes Jr.'s delicate acrylic painting of a young man wrapped in a bedsheet and perched on the sill of an open window. Other figural works of special interest include Bryan Kubecki's crayon portrait of an unnamed baby, Shawn Beard's small oil portrait of Thelonious Monk and Andrew Fullwood's carved wood sculpture Origins (Expecting II).

Also worth mentioning among sculptures are works by Richard Elaver and Kathleen Ramich. Elaver's three small coral- or fungi-like pieces from his "Grass Vase" series are made of a nylon-based material.

Ramich's piece -- a collaboration with "technicians" Michael Worrell and Dan Coulter -- is a sci-fi-influenced neon lamp surmounted by a shiny steel fixture that suggests a miniature version of a swiveling cannon or one of Wilhelm Reich's "cloud busters," designed for the ostensible purpose of deflecting UFOs from Earth's atmosphere.

Satirical collages

Just a few blocks to the east, another downtown show worth seeing before it closes on May 15 is the quirkily titled "Brain Bees," bringing together works by Shanthony Exum and Mike Shephard, two artists clearly enamored of 1960s pop art.

Exum's clever, socio-politically themed digital collages dominate the selection, numerically and otherwise. They're mounted on thin boards or on very small canvases in a few cases, and each of them economically combines a few appropriated images of people, animals and easily recognizable objects rendered in high-key colors. These satirical compositions comment on current and historical issues including party politics, consumerism, nuclear weapons, the beef industry, the influence of mass media and the World War II-era confinement of Japanese-American civilians in U.S. internment camps.

My favorites include Exum's rendition of Sarah Palin as a dog-headed, rifle-toting woman with a teapot floating above her head (from a series called "Profiles in Discouragement") and Your Love Is The Bomb, an image of a man fondling a bomb, bringing to mind Stanley Kubrick's great film Dr. Strangelove.

Shephard's contribution to the show is relatively small and uneven, devoted in part to candy-colored images that ironically mimic product-packaging designs and advertising imagery. The best of his batch to my eye is his most understated painting, Nostalgia-Core, a very small, abstracted image of an apple core in yellow, green and black.

The central, Victorian-style collage mural that incorporates the show's title in banner-scale letters is a nice touch. It's unattributed; maybe a collaborative effort between the two artists, but it looks more Exum than Shephard.

"Dimensions 2010" is on view through May 21 at Associated Artists Gallery, 301 W. Fourth St. For more information, call 722-0340.

"Brain Bees" is on view through Saturday at the Electric Moustache Gallery, adjacent to Krankie's Coffee Bar, 211 E. Third St. For more information, call 413-3690.