Mentors' turn to show off their visual artwork

The Kent Bellows Studio and Center for Visual Arts has tapped the metro area's top visual artists to mentor its students.

Those mentors now have their own show — “Panoptic” — at Creighton University's Lied Education Center for the Arts.

Panoptic refers to a point in a room where you can see everything at once. Weston Thomson, the show's curator, said the Lied gallery's layout, with its two conjoined rooms, reminded him of a panoptic architectural design.

But the term could also refer to the artwork itself. The different prints and paintings in the exhibit seem to touch on every conceivable style and emotion at once.

Printmaker Wanda Ewing's specialty is wry but perceptive humor. A University of Nebraska at Omaha art professor, Ewing has contributed several faux fashion magazine covers to the exhibit.

These linoleum prints show smiling African-American fashion models next to mock headlines such as “Blonde Is the New Black” and “Not Hood Enough: 25 Ways to Get Ghetto Fabulous.” Like many of her works, these pieces explore stereotypes and misconceptions of feminine beauty in American pop culture.

Thomson, who is also a Kent Bellows Studio mentor, likes to turn vague, abstract notions into concrete images.

For instance, we live in a society that trafficks in bits and pieces of information about things. Yet we rarely have all the information about any one thing. What would that look like?

Thomson shows us in his painting “Rooster,” which looks like a multicolored bird that got too close to a black hole. It depicts bits and pieces of bird that have been stretched across the canvas.

Natalie Linstrom has fun with religious stereotypes in “Goodness Gracious.” Her print shows an angel using a rosary to pull a fluffy, flower-sprouting cloud.

Matt Jones' work is primarily concerned with surface texture. His stone still lifes, made of polychrome plaster, look like rough marble slabs. They are, in fact, incredibly smooth to the touch.

Caolán O'Loughlin proves to be a master of light in his series of untitled landscapes. The horizons in these works range from sky blue to stormy gray.

Arguably the most powerful piece in the exhibit is Claudia Alvarez's “El Modo de Nico.” Alvarez's intensely expressive artworks suggest a narrative without ever revealing the whole story. “El Modo” shows a child standing between two adults. Both adults are holding something nondescript against the child's head. Are they books (knowledge) or guns (violence)? Alvarez leaves the answer to our imagination.

Contact the writer:

444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com

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