Visual Arts - It’s a small world after all

Ideas of solitude and alienation read loud and clear in the Savannah Gallery show Sense of Otherness. There are countless images in this group show of men, women and children frozen in stock-still, rabbit-in-the-headlights poses that convey feelings of estrangement and dislocation.

Otherness tries to make a case for the cultural specificity of that sense of isolation by centering the show on work addressing Asian culture created by Asian and non-Asian Savannah College of Art and Design students. But “otherness” is apparently an equal opportunity catchall. Everyone seems equally alienated, from the Western woman wearing geisha garb in Monica Cook’s beautifully rendered painting “Fly Bravely” to the Asian woman in Sara Gaviet La’s “Facade,” who seems less able to just cast off that stereotype of Sino feminine submissiveness.

Otherness is often a disorienting visual melee that veers wildly from trauma to social critique from images of genocide to ones of Hello Kitty that may leave a warped impression of Asian culture as some universally accessible freak-out zone.

For the trauma side, there are powerful, haunting works by Hong Tran, which depict political prisoners with numbers pinned to their chests in the ultimate expression of being reduced to an alien “other.” But it is often hard to reconcile the gravity of those images with more pop culture-surfing works like Michael Thrush’s across the gallery. Thrush offers saucy paintings in eye-popping colors recalling Jeff Koons and James Rosenquist that depict a Japanese consumer culture of cheery cartoon hamburgers and heaping bowls of shellfish and noodles. In the margins of those images are cockroaches and images from porn that suggest there are darker things brewing beneath such woozy enticements to buy-buy-buy.

But feeling alienated from imminent death and feeling alienated from consumer culture are not even in the same ballpark. There is a range of interesting work in Otherness but a head-swimming lack of thematic unity. Nothing quite gels within such maddening comparisons between genocide and fast food, gender repression and some vague, indecipherable malaise.

Sense of Otherness runs through June 26 at Savannah Gallery, 3096 Roswell Road, Atlanta. Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 404-816-0247. www.scad.edu/thesavannahgallery.