JRB show features known and emerging artists
“Past, Present and Future” is the title of a show that looks back, as well as to the here and now, and future, in work by well-known and emerging artists.
The large, eclectic, new year group exhibit is on display through Jan. 28 at JRB Art at The Elms gallery, 2810 N Walker.
Older artists — including some who have passed away — are well-represented, sometimes by forward-thinking, currently relevant work.
D.J. Lafon (1929-2011) offers us a timely, satirically exaggerated acrylic of a bald man, whose “Thought for the Day” is of young women in black lingerie.
Also strongly satiric and current is a sculpture by David Phelps of a reclining, Playboy-like bronze rabbit, who thinks “I’m Too Sexy for the Garden.”
Both realistic and surrealistic, rather than satiric, is an untitled oil panel by Sara Scribner.
In Scribner’s oil, two birds hover over the shoulders of a woman in black, clasping her hands almost prayerfully as the tide comes in or goes out behind her.
In a collage, a measuring tape, ticket stubs, yearbook photos and a souvenir plate, help Marilyn Artus measure the time since Oklahoma gave women the right to vote in 1920.
Several small oil stick or pencil works from the “Burbank Diary” series of George Bogart (1933-2005) evoke brilliantly the cycle of nature, rebirth and re-budding.
More abstract than Bogart’s garden plants are the crimson, seed-like dabs of paint, floating over a big white “x” and red grid in Larry Hefner’s “Crossing” acrylic.
Looser and less illusionistic are the grids of rectangles or flaglike stripes found in such Laura Nugent acrylics as “Small Voice” and “These Old Walls.”
A little state flaglike is “Valiant,” an acrylic by Mike Larsen of a man, clad in fringed buckskin and a headdress, holding a peace pipe in one arm across his body.
Possessing great presence, too, are three 35-inch-high female ceramic figures, with simplified, stylized features, by Harolyn Long, collectively called “Leaving the Velvet Path.”
N. Scott Momaday, in his “La Muerte” monoprint, supplies one of the show’s best works, depicting a blackrobed figure, with only his gray enigmatic face showing.
Stylized in a weird way is the skinny man in a red blouse, with a black beard, boots and top hat, holding a crow in one hand, symbolic of the “ID,” in an oil by Michele Mikesell.
Equally strange — and engaging — is Denise Duong’s collage painting of a woman in a black dress “Killing Time” while female figures and two balloonists hang from her stringy hair.
Also eccentrically appealing is Eric Piper’s black-and-white relief monoprint of a woman whose face seems hollowed out and dripping water on her submerged shoulders.
Sohail Shehada uses soft pastel and divided panels to depict a bearded, wizardlike, kimono-clad man, in his “Homage to the Ballets Russes.”
Amply demonstrating the gallery’s openness to a wide variety of styles and content, the JRB show is highly recommended during its run.