luag.org - Artists capture good and evil in Lehigh University show

Angels consort with devils in ''Area Artists 2009,'' a Lehigh University annual show with a stinging, singing sense of whiplash.

Winifred Helton-Harmon contributes poster-size digital color photographs of lush, lashing grasses. Using zesty hues and spot blurring, the Lafayette College teacher leaves the impression of arcing streamers and flaming ribs. Her suncatchers have the absorbency of watercolors, the residue of acrylics.

Rigo Peralta is best known for painting romantic, industrial fantasies. Here the Banana Factory studio artist is represented by digital photos of deteriorated, slyly animated cemetery angels.

Tinted blue by the cyanotype process, these stone women have startlingly clear robes, pores and auras. Peralta makes them more cinematic with tilted angles, more beautific with almost haloed backlight. Each statue acts on a stage of private confession and public absolution.

There are barriers galore in Amze Emmons' multimedia, split-screen images of the aftermath of human and natural disasters. In one picture a sofa and a pink-lined coffee table are unlikely survivors among rubbed-out rubble. Another work features concrete barricades, colored a disarmingly pleasant lemon-lime, scattered under a jagged, putty-colored sky-curtain with white silhouettes of telephone poles. The combination is both ominous and curious.

The banality of evil hovers in Karina Aguilera Skvirsky's 30-by-24-inch C prints of lynching sites in Maryland. The Lafayette College teacher, who grew up two blocks from the Maryland-Washington border, depicts shockingly normal, slowly haunted intersections: an overgrown lot by a McDonald's; a coin-operated laundry in a Colonial building that could be an old service station.

The most moving picture is a foreshortened, squirrel's-eye view of the massive sycamore where George Armwood died in 1933. The scabby bark resembles a whipped corpse; the bulbous knots could be mistaken for broken bones.

''Area Artists 2009,'' through May 1, Siegel Gallery, Iacocca Hall, South Mountain campus, Lehigh University, Bethlehem. Reception and gallery talk 4-6 p.m. March 20. Hours: 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday; also open during weekend receptions. 610-758-3615, http://www.luag.org .

geoff.gehman@mcall.com

610-820-6516