"J. Todd Allison: Unresting" A Winnebago rides cresting waves like some mobile surfboard, while bouquets of esophagus-like flowers hang overhead and sprout from the water. An air vent unit twists and turns, an upside-down chair attaches to one end and green petals shoot out of it like a leaf blower. Birds fly over a miniature living-room scene in which a red book is as big as a couch. These oil paintings by J. Todd Allison are, suffice it to say, surreal. They're also some of the more concrete images lending themselves to description among the nearly 20 new works in a solo show currently up at G Gallery. In fact, many of the ink drawings and oil paintings consist of imagery that doesn't seem to depict anything — or anything familiar, at least. From his carefully rendered paintings of chairs, Winnebagos and air vents to other repeated imagery including birds, conch shells, fishing lures and houses, it's difficult to discern what, exactly, Allison is saying with this visual language. And the 18 pieces in the Houston artist's show are packed with this information — visuals the artist has said he pulls from such diverse sources as novels, conversation, science illustrations from grade school, and a garage. So while the resulting images don't seem like anything out of our reality, they are very much so, just highly disjointed. However strange and unfamiliar his paintings and drawings are, it's hard to deny Allison's skill in rendering these flat, surrealist landscapes. There's an incredible amount of painstaking detail given to each piece, whether it's the loose-leaf-paper-sized ink drawings or the massive canvases and panels. They're worth spending time in front of just for that. Through December 30. 301 East 11th St., 713-869-4770. — MD
"Jerry Jeanmard: Collages" Jerry Jeanmard has an eye. The longtime Houston resident has worked as an interior designer for nearly 30 years for the firm Wells Design/Jerry Jeanmard. He's also made his name as an illustrator; his claim to fame is one of his earliest jobs — the Blue Bell Ice Cream logo (you know the one — the silhouette of a little girl leading a cow for milking). For the past five years, Jeanmard has turned his eye to a less public endeavor — creating collages out of envelopes, bills and other scraps of paper. These pieces usually didn't see the light of day, going into storage upon completion or being sold to select clients. But lucky for us, the artist has his first solo show in an exhibition of 17 collages currently up at Moody Gallery. The collages were born out of Jeanmard's fascination with paper, and he's not discriminating. What would normally be seen by most as pieces of garbage are treasured items to Jeanmard. Once they're combined, the resulting conglomerations are clean and sharp, even where the paper is uneven, torn or creased. There's a nice continuity to the show, too — all of the works are done on the same size paper, and all of the collages are enveloped by a significant amount of white space, which helps the somewhat muted colors stand out. It's tempting to try to draw some sort of meaning out of the items used in the collages, from text to recognizable forms such as stamps and maps. But as the phrase goes, they are what they are. In fact, none of the pieces on display are even titled. (Broken Hearted, the lone titled work, sold and has since been replaced by an untitled piece.) If anything, these pieces are mostly about the appreciation of the paper. There can be beauty (or, more so the case here, a strong pleasantness) even in the most unlikely places, a lesson which can always bear repeating. Through January 5. 2815 Colquitt, 713-526-9911. — MD
