Local student artists exhibit works during gallery opening

Rites of Passage 2006, Part II, is definitely worth the short drive up Madison Avenue, simply for the color displayed by its works.

Kimberly Hennessy, a senior fine art major focusing in painting at UC, and Amy Mauck of the University of Dayton, share the main room of the gallery, which is located at 2727 Woodburn Ave.

Their works are somewhat figurative - somewhat because the figures of animals slide in and out of Hennessy's eclectic media works, while Mauck's oils focus on a very small part of the human figure: the navel. Both artists employ color richly, but in different ways.

In this second part of the Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center's juried exhibition, a showcase of the work of graduating seniors, a group exhibition by students from Ohio State University took over the back room. Although their topic - the filtering and translation of vision - is interesting, the group can't compete with the two artists from the front room.

Hennessy's works and the premise behind them are interesting, to say the least.

Hennessy drew her inspiration from her roommate, who one day said, "All I need now is to get smarter, lose weight and have more money."

From this statement she extracts "what humans are obsessed with," and what, consequently, they project onto the animal kingdom. She takes animals like the elephant, whale and pig that might normally be insulted by human adjectives like "poor, fat, misunderstood," and , gives them a new system of categorization, "fat, smart and flamboyant."

"Ultimately," Hennessey writes in her artist's statement, she hopes to "expose humans for the unique tribe of ridiculous name callers that we are, living among the millions of other obviously blissful species."

One piece, "Transposable," made up of numerous individual works hung with pins, ranges from pig doodles that float above a green landscape to globbed paint that looks like mustard. "Transposable" exhibits what it is: a collection of interesting ideas, rather than a fully incorporated work of art.

"Puerca," also by Hennessey, is a little more in tune with itself. At the lower left, sketches of appliances or pieces of furniture partly obscure an animal skeleton. In the rest of the work, colored pencil outlines animal profiles in such a way that, from certain angles, they don't look like figures at all.

Hennessey said that part of the relaxed organization of her work comes from animals themselves, at least how their behavior looks from a human perspective.

But also, she said, "the research that I do about animals is really just a jumping off point."

Her research on animals - which keeps her house full of something like 30 library books at all times - is part of her senior thesis. For example, in exploring stereotypes and typical images, she made a drawing of an elephant ear.

"I think I'm pretty self indulgent in my work," she said with a smile. "And sometimes I just want it to be fun."

Sarah Allen, 21, who came down from Columbus with a member of the OSU group, said she liked Hennessey's use of "insult words," repurposed, to look at beauty in a new way.

"I've never seen this topic treated this way," she said, and added with a smile, "and I like the colors."

Allen said she definitely sees the artist's purpose in her artwork: "the part about obsession: the lines, and how meticulous the works are."

One realization viewers may glean from Hennessey's work is how fun a shape the "snout" really is, just as Mauck's work demonstrates how surprisingly interesting belly buttons can be.

Amy Mauck, whose works, "Hardcore" and "Universal Offspring" examine the navel, explains her art in this way: "The beauty of natural nuances is the catalyst of my paintings; hence, I found the discovery of formal and conceptual complexity through the small crevice empowering."

Her paintings are done in oil; that medium in combination with her use of color makes her paintings seem luminescence.