Mixed Media 
Tree Tales: Leto Blackman(0)
September 4, 2010 —
Viewing Leto Blackman’s mixed-media work is like looking at a picture storybook with no words beyond the title. You know something’s going on … but it’s up to you to write the tale.
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Pixels and Ciphers: Matthew Huff
Huff has come up with an intriguing premise — blowing up cell phone photos and combining them with a graffiti-inspired code of his own divising — and made it work on both the visual and conceptual fronts.
Painter Provocateur: Jenny Meyer McCall
Jenny Meyer McCall’s abstracts stake unapologetic claims on the viewer’s attention — and reward that attention with both up-front revelations and subtle detail.
PRESERVE, TRANSFORM
Transforming literal reading material into sculptures that speak to formal as well as conceptual concerns, nine artists’ work in “Altered Books” offers surprising presence. Hosted by Artspace at Untitled in Oklahoma City, the exhibition is on view through October 9, 2010.
Victoriously Victorian : Eric Doucette
Eric Doucette has an eye not only for recreating the past, but for updating the classics and making them his own.
Scientific Progress: Cory Gene Mayes
Cory Gene Mayes displays a range of influences as wide as the list of media he uses to execute his work. He’s in comfortable touch with his minimalist side, but can also lace up his Willem de Kooning shoes with the best of them.
Beauty Preserved: Venus Auxier
While Venus Auxier’s preserved botanical art is on display during the hottest, muggiest part of the year, it still serves as an advance reminder of what we’ll be missing this winter.
INTANGIBLE IN THE THROWN-AWAY
Much of Nari Ward’s “Re-Presence” explores the other-worldliness and breadth of everyday experience through large themes such as poverty and patriotism. He succeeds especially in his subtle and persistent employment of repetition in the found objects that make up his sculptures, on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art through August 29.
PRICING THE ‘COOL’
Wonder Fair gallery in Lawrence takes on the seemingly-arbitrary system of art market pricing with “Hott Sheets.” Deconstructing the façade of expertise by applying a tongue-in-cheek Value Assessment Methodology Form to 94 works on view through July 25, curators aim to determine the value of value-making in the art world.
Going Deep: Alicia Kelly
Kelly’s work is complex and layered with visual allusions — not merely artistic nods, but invocations of all sorts of -ologies.
Spare and Intricate, Silent and Eloquent: Ky Anderson
Anderson’s mixed-media paintings (oil and acrylic on paper), executed in a cool palette heavy on the blues and greens, are studies in both harmony and dichotomy. They are by turns — and usually within the same panel — simple and complex, elegant and raw, soothing and stimulating.
The Power of Juxtapositive Thinking: Lori Wright
Lori Wright’s canvases are full of seemingly incongruous images, playing with and off each other. Fruit is a recurring theme, often in combination with renderings of animals. Rather than focusing on how the various elements are different, though, Wright hopes her viewers will look for ways to connect them; her work is on display at b gallery through the end of the month.
THE ARTIST AS A RELIGIOUS MAN
Brendan O’Shaughnessy’s series of intaglio prints is an open-faced sharing of his spiritual journey and convictions; though most of the works in the solo exhibition are quite literal in their depiction, their direct communication is accessible and also executed with artistic prowess. Visual forms here have bold, communicative qualities reminiscent of works by Modernists like Paul Rand and Alvin Lustig, and the emotions conveyed represent struggles that are universally human.
GHOST-LIKE INTRIGUE IN DESIGN
Patterned-based images created through layering convey the idea of histories, layers of lives making their marks on building structures — marks that fade over time. These works form part of j.m.rees’s solo exhibition, which includes a large central sculpture and one digital media work, on view at the Epsten Gallery through June 27. Join the artist for a talk June 23 at 3 p.m. or on closing day for a visit.
j.m.rees: UNIVERSAL MAN
The journey that j.m.rees has made along his life has been fueled by an expansive passion to learn about architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, carpentry, writing, art — and the myriad ways in which these disciplines converge to tell universal narratives. Janell Meador outlines his steps and accomplishments and shares a video studio tour with the artist, too.