The unrequited love of Melody Owen

Melody Owen's "Torch Songs", currently at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, is a sweet if disparate collection of works based on obscured communication. The artist uses a variety of mediums to evoke the torch song, a sentimental chanson of unrequited love. Owen aligns her work in both the conceptual and visual camps, though some of the hand wringing over the distinction is often much ado about nothing.

The strongest work in the show is "MGM Lion," a video of said animal doing his usual roar - silently - while polished gems escape his mouth. In the 33-second work, glossy, spinning colored diamonds, sapphires and emeralds make their way from his grainy black and white roar. The brevity is encouraging and respectful in an art world that too often asks us to watch long, uneventful examples of constipated, obscure drudgery. And who doesn't love the MGM Lion?

The artist confessed that old films and film stars were a major, if indirect, influence on her work. The MGM lion presides like a godfather over the entire exhibition, elegantly spewing the stuff dreams are made of.

Another highlight is "Sonets," a small series of collages. Each collage is an encounter between two birds in which they are placed against stark, one-color backgrounds and then united by thread. The birds maintain eye contact but are still very isolated in these sparse, elegant compositions. Birds have been done by the collage greats - Joseph Cornell and Max Ernst come to mind - but Owen succeeds in adding her own personal style and message.

"Index to Atlas" asked for time from the viewer and, while confusing at first, makes a case for the isolation of lost love. Removed from the original context and tacked on the wall, old book indexes seem to record the sad and random facts of life, like love affairs that come and go. Visually, the removed indexes, spiraling in a downward slide, did not convince as strongly as some of the other work; however, vehicles for lost love have their own, unsorted pain to address and perhaps owe us nothing.

This exhibition also held a group of straight-ahead pencil drawings called "Empathy Series," which were almost unnecessary. In the human hand were various animals. The idea was that the line would vary so little that you could not tell where a human ended and an animal began. The emotive quality so important to pulling off this kind of simple exercise was not quite there, especially when compared to more untraditional mediums in which this artist excels.

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