Art review: Self-taught work in wood brims with wit and menace

Bottom line: Charm abounds in this small show of self-taught work using the common language of wood.

A jewel box of a show, the modest size and humble sensibility of "A Cut Above: Wood Sculpture From the Gordon W. Bailey Collection" shouldn't deter viewers from a visit.

The High often features smaller, less heralded exhibitions among its blockbusters (the current photography show “What Is Near: Reflections on Home” featuring an array of local photographers is another good example), shows with a very narrow focus that allow you to dig into an idea without feeling overwhelmed. Call it a snack rather than an epic, multicourse meal.

“A Cut Above”’s content marks the third major donation of works by self-taught artists from collector Gordon W. Bailey, whose gifts have enriched the already significant High collection of folk art.

The works themselves range from the whimsical to the mildly alarming. As with much self-taught art, Bible parables are common, with Moses, Jonah, Jesus and other stock players making an appearance.

Sulton Rogers delivers one of the more charming works on that Good Book front, with his tiny, terrified Jonah being devoured feet first — the better for us to appreciate the look of animated horror on his face — by the gray whale. His work is a lovely parallel to William Owens’ more contemporary — and personal — variation on the Bible story housed in the same vitrine. Owens showcases another ravenous whale with a bug-eyed man in his jaws, though this time it is an “IRS Agent Swallowed by Whale.” Owens, it seems, had a bone to pick with the feds, though he found a uniquely creative way to vent his frustration.

Rogers offers up several very appealing pieces in “A Cut Above,” showing the streak of levity and humor coursing through his tiny human effigies who become stand-ins for our own anxieties.

One vitrine contains Rogers’ brilliantly funny, telling commentaries on love and marriage. In “Couple,” a man and a woman wear expressions of googly-eyed terror, though this time it’s relationships rather than biblical tragedy that give them their frantic, sweaty expressions. Rogers has a wonderful way of boiling the signifiers of male and female down to their constituent parts: in this case a bald, mustached dude and his cleavage-baring date. Another couple captured at their wedding wear expressions of comparable discombobulation.

Ivy Billiot’s hilariously humanoid “Bear” is another comic effigy, one of several animals featured in “A Cut Above.” Greeting visitors with raised claws and bared teeth, the creature’s Mickey Mouse ears and smoothly whittled body (which looks like nothing so much as a bear in a pantsuit) give this ursine brute a goofball demeanor.

While a kind of simplified realism in his carved and painted human figures defines Rogers’ work, other artists use the organic forms of found branches, limbs and their attendant burs, knots and imperfections to craft their figures. Ralph Griffin lets the wood’s contours guide his subject matter, using the naturally rough texture and projecting limbs to fashion his “Wizard.” By the same token, Bessie Harvey’s haunting “Untitled” work is a figure out of a nightmare, a strange beast with two heads and two sets of eyes sprouting from the same craggy, tentacled branch, suggesting lurking spirits that Harvey unleashes from the wood.