By Jim Duncan CVFDude@aol.com

The bearable lightness of being

Drake University opened an art show last week (“Interrupted Life” at Olmstead Center) about, and partially by, women in prison. While I viewed, a curator urged students to reach conclusions about injustice in America. In their long discussion, no one referred to the art, just personal anecdotes and statistics. Class climaxed when a white male confessed that society was totally racist. Now, I doubt many of the artists in the show object to being used (to raise the pay of public defenders?), but there’s an apt adage in the art world: College teaches you to be passionate and political; the real world teaches you to be ironic, or a teacher.

Des Moines now has an emerging art scene because artists have learned the real world lesson of applying earnestness with irony. Lee Ann Conlan is an act apart within that scene. She represents herself at a career stage when most artists need a gallery. It’s not for lack of opportunities, either; she’s been heavily courted. Conlan enjoys being her own agent, running her own Web site, creating her own invitations.

“I actually have a lot of fun doing it. My clients are so wonderful, I feel like treating them,” she said about lavish announcements, on handmade paper, for “Lee Ann” which opens Friday in the Fitch Building (15th and Walnut). Conlan’s following ranges from Boomer doctors to Gen Y rock stars. Her art speaks to such diversity in basic universal themes — death and sensuality — with subtle skill. Skulls and nudes prop her repertoire, but in intricate processes. In several works, images are created with multiple alternate layers of handmade paper and charcoal on canvas, with paint and epoxy on top of that. Yet, the complexity is invisible — they have the appearance of paintings with striking dimension, not mixed-media collages.

The big piece in the show, which will redefine the artist for awhile, is a medieval scene in the Gothic Abbey of St. Denis. Figures in various stages of emaciation and decay are seeking shelter where kings of France are laid to rest. It’s radical for Conlan, putting figures in such a dramatic narrative. It also puts the show in a cycle of life context — all her simple nudes have a seed of mortality in their countenance and her skeletons have an existential life force.

At Mars Café (2318 University), Amy Koenig demonstrates another light touch on heavy matters. She suspends the most ephemeral things — maple leaves, butterflies — in a state of grace the Japanese call “aware.” At the same time she seems to be fighting for her sanity, or her soul. “I Fell to Pieces” shows a fragmented head, composed of multiple layers, much like the human brain it reflects upon. One fragment is a prescription pad of an eminent Des Moines neurosurgeon; other parts are literature about the soul, hymnals and pop music. It’s a wry exposition of debates between religion and science that drive many mad.

Even lighter existential reflections spruce a delightful ceramic exhibition at From Our Hands (400 East Locust). Linda Lewis presents glazed clay sculptures with Reginald Marsh-like humor. Women contemplate swimsuits, decades out of style. Others collect birds and even human skulls. Farmers think about their crops while corn grows out of their heads.

Sharon Nelson-Vaux is a complete original. She shows “xylostones,” her name for stones with messages inside — “Things, like me, you can not read without destroying the object of your curiosity.” Her “Hail Sized Golf Balls” and “Kiln Guards” have issues, too. These sculptures cannot have feet, “for if they did they would be feet of clay and thus unreliable.” They accept tips. They carry children in their mouths — because they are “mouth breeders.” They have prominent uvula, a concession to political correctness “because the uvula is one body part that people have not been conditioned to feel self-conscious about.” Through October.

Pimp touts

Medium is the message at Olson-Larsen Gallery’s autumn Iowa landscape show. Barbara Fedeler uses willow charcoal to dramatize the hills and dales of northeast Iowa. Mary Merkel-Hess lets paper, reeds and paint reflect on natural grasslands and forests. Dennis Dykema is a full palette oil painter, consciously Van Goghish at times, of northwest Iowa. Through Nov. 25.

The University of Iowa Museum of Art’s “Jules Kirschenbaum: The Need to Dream of Some Transcendent Meaning,” is so well hung and lit that it’s like seeing the master painter’s work in a whole new light. Through Dec. 10.

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