Artbeat

Leave it to Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery, the funky little lowbrow display space upstairs at Tate's Comics in Lauderhill, to come up with an exhibition theme as clever as it is gimmicky. For "Three of a Kind," two dozen or so artists, most based locally, were invited to submit works linked by the number three. Just how the concept of threeness applies was left up to the artists. Some, such as Amanda Valdés and the artist endearingly known as Terribly Odd, take a single image and spread it over three panels. Others settle on common subject matter to link their works: Danny Brito's Animal Collective, which includes a trio of colored pencil and watercolor portraits of long-necked, geeky-looking girls in headgear, and John Kissee's digital canvas prints of Uhura, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman. Alessandro Echevarria starts with a conceptual title, Crippled Rhetoric, and renders it as a tripartite human figure fragmented into logos, pathos, and ethos. Janet Gold weighs in with two abstract triptychs, Well Balanced and Ambiguously Evident, so spare and ethereal that they seem to have wandered in from a more highbrow show. Most ambitious of all is the giddily blasphemous triptych Ham for the Holidays, painted in acrylic enamel on three hinged, mirrored panels. Subtitled The Life of Jesus as interpreted through the 3 Little Pigs, it includes, from left to right, big bad wolves as the Magi (bearing gifts of meat cleaver, barbecue sauce, and skillet, no less), who drool over a piglet in a manger while a heavenly haloed ham floats above; the Crucifixion as a sort of demented barbecue; and a resurrected pig presiding over a doormat reading "WELCOME BACK," a slain wolf, and a mailbox brimming with sausages. (On display through February 21 at Bear and Bird Boutique + Gallery, 4566 N. University Dr., Lauderhill. Call 954-748-0181.)