Annual Faculty Exhibition

Comments (0) By Marya Summers Thursday, Oct 11 2007

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'Tis the season to be hot for teacher (easy when there's a kiln involved) and for the faculty to debunk that nasty adage about those who teach. "Annual Faculty Exhibition" shows what these teachers can do in three galleries full of ceramics, sculpture, jewelry and metals, glass, printmaking and photography, and drawing and painting. It's an opportunity, of course, for aspiring and developing artists to audition their prospective teachers, but this show also provides an excellent chance for the rest of us to see the talent that walks among us mere mortals. Clarence "Skip" Measelle, whose blues-inspired photorealism and trompe-l'il adorn the walls of the Lake Worth blues club Bamboo Room, shows off his mixed-media Alchemy, which incorporates collaged images and works with both the texture of his canvas and visual dualities — watched/watcher, male/female, black/white. Victoria Skinner's mysterious and visually poetic mixed-media collages wrench the subconscious. Dennis Aufiery lends his colorful impressionistic oil paintings of local spots like the Okeechobee Boulevard car wash in Top Hat to the Show. Trisha Halverson's sculpture Family Tree explores origins and organics and provides a nice counterpoint to Helen Otterson's light sculptures, like Endoplasmic Flagella, which are funky boxes of color and light. In photography, Richard Reddy's work Picasso's Woodpile, Bantram Trail discovers faces in a tree's trunk and shows that cubism is as much a natural phenomenon as an artistic movement. And Brian Somerville's dark humor emerges in the anthropomorphized sculpture Never Trust a Babysitter, a nod to the nasty instincts that lurk beneath our human façades. (Through October 20 at Armory Art Center, 1700 Parker Ave., West Palm Beach. Call 561-832-1776.)