Galleries: Artists' subversive sense of humor at Vox Populi

The first in a series of three guest-artist exhibitions at Vox Populi Gallery has no title, but all four of its artists share a subversive sense of humor.

Michael May tells the story of a mental-patient character he has invented, through a group of oil paintings depicting the character's misbegotten cures and inventions. As in mid-20th-century instructional posters, each of May's paintings is divided into several parts demonstrating the steps involved. In Extracting Spirits from Photos of Native Americans, for example, three measuring cups and bottles of denatured alcohol and mineral spirits sit on a counter; on the adjacent stove is a glass baking dish containing portraits of American Indians, with a vacuum-cleaner hose attached to its base. Fountain of Youth combines separate images of a bathroom sink; a counter with an assortment of age-prevention creams and a fountainlike apparatus on it; and a view of a pipe beneath the sink with the fountain attached to it. May's video of interviews with himself and his character (played convincingly by an actor), and examples of still-life objects that appear in his paintings mounted on shelves, turn what might have been simply a group of curious paintings into an even curiouser project.

Deliberately messy in a cheerful Fauve palette of oranges, pinks, greens, and yellows, and full of competing Matisse- and Dufy-like patterns, Michael Van Winkle's small still-life paintings pairing two or three objects - a table and a skull, for instance, or a bottle and a sword - walk a fine line between just right and too cavalier. Clearly, a salon-style installation is meant to be invoked, but his encyclopedic presentation of 25 paintings and works on paper undercuts his finest moments, among them his untitled painting of a single tiger lily in a vase.

At first glance, it's hard to believe that Dan Levenson's exacting installation, "SKZ Student Monochrome Workshop," about a fictional state art academy in Zurich, isn't true. Those large, black, monochrome paintings propped against the wall look at least 20 years old, and the unpainted sides of the paintings even reveal yellowed and stained linen. The wooden storage cabinet seems of a similar vintage, as do the magazines and postcards relating to the school. Levenson's video of a woman recounting her memories of a fellow student is less believable, though, possibly because we're used to seeing fictions in videos (as in May's). Still, this is a clever, perfectly executed deception.