Cliff Hengst and Wayne Smith both have shows up in Gallery 16 right now, and while each one maintains the unique voice of its creator the two exhibitions together create an incredible dialogue. Hengst has long been one of my favorite local artists (I have a piece of his hanging right above my bed at home), and at Gallery 16 he displays recent work in which he has started with newspaper pictures of protesters and then blacked out everything except the signs and the occasional raised fist. The words left to float on their own mirror the words and phrases he has painted directly onto one long wall in the gallery, block black characters against the white wall with letters sometimes overlapping or again blacked out entirely. The meaning is sublimated into pattern. And where Hengst erases, Smith superimposes, floating his cut-out humans and animals in glass in front of found thrift store paintings. He creates some wonderful juxtapositions and tableaux that way, like a sea of detached heads bobbing against painted waves or a stack of packing boxes standing alone in an idyllic forest glen. However, the piece of his I was most drawn into was the one he too put right on a gallery wall, an undulating stream of small excised heads all facing away from the viewer. They formed an attractive cloud-like shape from far away and then resolved themselves into their individual personae upon closer inspection. Meticulous and hypnotic work.
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