A & E

Not to be missed during the 47th annual Three Rivers Arts Festival, the exhibition "Projects 2006: dialogue and change," gives visitors a chance to see contemporary sculpture on a national scale.

A presentation of The Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors, the exhibition featured at PPG Wintergarden was co-organized by Indiana University of Pennsylvania art professor James Nestor and sculptor Jennifer Bechak.

Including the work of a dozen artists, it is noticeably smaller than similar exhibitions sponsored by the group in years previous, but, Bechak says, "This show is smaller than previous exhibitions because I was focusing on bringing quality work into the PPG Wintergarden, opposed to quantity. The works are also large-scale pieces that require space for the viewer to walk around and capture the entire nature of the piece."

The exhibition actually begins outside, across the street from PPG in Four Gateway Center Plaza, where Illinois artist Pam Ayres has installed "Grass Terraces," an environmental installation of sorts comprised of seed sprouting sacks of soil stacked like river stones within the shrubbery.

Not far away, Danish artist Line Bruntse, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, gets equally interactive with the space with "Epitab," a colorful construction of more than 150 pink concrete disks, propped up by various steel supports, that echo the pink roses growing nearby.

Inside the PPG Wintergarden, that delightful interaction and engagement with surroundings is not lost with the rest of the works. For example, looking up at West Virginia artist Alison Helm's towering metal and glass flower-like piece "Justified Status," it will be hard to deny the interplay of the curvaceous purple stained glass petals against the angular architecture of the metal and glass ceiling in Wintergarden.

Interactive on a more personal level, Pennsylvania artist Matthew Barton adds a touch of humor to the show with "Animals in a Tree Rave," a columnar, tree-like structure that calls attention to itself with colorful flashing lights. Press the appropriate buttons on the backside of this ersatz tree and either bubbles or steam will emanate from different openings to indicate the "party" going on inside the tree.

Also whimsical in nature are two large flower-shaped sculptures by Gary Justis, also from Illinois. Both combine metal and micro-suede to bring forth larger-than-life, futuristic-looking flowers. Here, they appear as if the perfect compliment to Wintergarden, which itself looks like an oversized greenhouse from the future.

Though all of these works have a contemporary, almost cold feeling to them, in unexpected contrast, three video works belie their own hi-tech trappings and grasp for more visceral or heartfelt experiences.

Chief among them, Indiana artist Kaz McCue's "Forget," features an elderly woman eating alone among a backdrop of vintage photoghraphic negatives -- pictures of this person's life perhaps -- that is sure to tug at the heartstrings of anyone who has elderly parents or grandparents who live alone.

Then there is Pennsylvania artist Patricia Villalobos Echeverria's "ALAMAR," which focuses on the human body as metaphor for cultural experience. Using images of swimmers, this Nicaraguan native explores issues of placement or geography and the body.

Nearby, New York artist Margaret Cogswell's "Cuyahoga Fugues: The Cuyahoga River" examines one of the four classical elements in ancient Greek philosophy: water. Basically a montage of images that relate to the seasons, the various images of frozen river and falling fresh water evoke nature like nothing else in this show.

But as visceral as these videos are, nothing can approach the gut-wrenching feeling most men will likely get from Arkansas artist Barbara Monoian's primitive piece "Fall Hunt." Basically a low-slung, bulbous fleshy sack made of deer hide and suspended between two ladders made from twigs, the piece seems almost pornographic. Far from sensual, the sack looks torturously stretched and pulled to the extreme by gravity. It's as if the artist is trying to make the most barbaric of feminist statements. If that's her goal, she most definitely succeeded.

Finally, the show culminates, at least in this reviewer's opinion -- as I imagine it would with any critic -- with Tennessee artist Michael Aurbach's tongue-in-cheek work "Critical Theorist." A Rube Goldberg-like contraption, it resembles a machine in which "high art" is processed into "critical theory" by way of various metal components made up of everday objects like a tea pots, meat grinders and strainers; and labeled appropriately at various junctures -- "art evaporator," "spin cycle," "cutting edge," etc.

The average visitor might consider the piece something of an inside joke, but the point, no doubt, will not be lost.

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