By Jessica Armbruster

When people think of art, they probably don't mentally flash to watercolors and fingerpaints on a preschool classroom wall. But why not? This is exactly where Amy Crickenberger Oeth draws inspiration from. She creates art free from the obvious expectations and packaging. As a result, her paintings take on a free-form quality: Watercolor, acrylics, and oil splash, swirl, and giggle in an uninhibited celebration of imagination. White boxes travel across a red rainbow or are rocketed in yellow across a bloom of blue. Whimsical, to say the least, her work is reminiscent of the best of fridge art: enthusiastic, smile-inducing, and randomly lovely. Also showing at "News from the Moon" will be Jennifer Davis, whose acrylic paintings, drawings, and collage work also emit whimsy like a homemade cupcake: Images include a cat slurping milk under a sea of gumdrop colors, and people boarding a giant, multicolored, pastel armadillo for a ride.

By Mary O'Regan

The newspaper could be called “Celestial Times,” “The Daily Crater,” or “Rover Review.” Either way, local artists Jennifer Davis and Amy Crickenberger Oeth are bringing news from the moon in a new exhibit at Rosalux Gallery.

The creative team has been drawing inspiration from one another’s work since they met in college in 1994. Davis uses muted pastels, painting bizarre scenes of hunched, faceless people, space age bumper cars, and the top half of a girl’s body swinging in the breeze on a clothesline. In theory, her work seems twisted and surreal, but she softens the mood with gentle pinks and sweet animal cameos.

Crickenberger Oeth takes an abstract approach, brightening up her pieces with yellows and blues. Through heavy textures and strong shapes, each painting creates a vague sense of place, without pinpointing a precise activity. Similar to a child’s imagination or a messy dream,
Crickenberger Oeth creates a unique blend between tranquility and spontaneity.

In addition to their individual pieces, the exhibit features both artists’ paintings side-by-side, allowing visitors to see how two minds can make distinct, yet intimately acquainted work.

By Mary Abbe

Minnesota's own Jennifer Davis and Amy Crickenberger Oeth get the Most Appealing Title prize for their new show at Rosalux Gallery. It probably won't contain much real news from the moon, but it promises to be chock full of whimsical dreamscapes and playful abstractions that tap into an otherworldly vein of imagination. Friends since college in the early 1990s, the duo turn out drawings, paintings and collages that are mindful of life's daily pleasures or what Davis calls "the unspoken truths of existence." Think, for example, of bumper cars as seen in Davis' festive little drawing shown above. Not to be outdone, Oeth even offers something disarmingly like a rainbow, below. The world needs this. More, please.

Candyland

By Gregory J. Scott

Jennifer Davis’s paintings are a lot like salt-water taffy. Her characters—bleary-eyed sea lions, kitten-headed schoolgirls and other adorable animal-human amalgams—are delicious pastel treats housed inside ghostly environments as cloudy and cling-less as a wax-paper wrapper. Her paintings are retro, in that they remind you of some vintage-styled childhood where bumper cars tap each other on a nostalgic Jersey boardwalk. Most of all, her pink- and orange-sherbet-hued paintings are dreamy and sweet—a combination that’s almost always described as “girly.”

In fact, most articles about Davis, 32, rely heavily on adjectives like “cute” and “boutique.” And Davis does work from drawers full of paper scraps, postcards and other mementos, snipping and collaging them together until inspiration takes over. But she’s no introverted adolescent, scrapbooking away her Saturday afternoons in a bedroom with ponies on
the wallpaper.

“A lot of my artwork is about youth, dreams, memories, innocence and wonder,” Davis says. “But I think I have managed to convey these ideas in a way that does not completely alienate ‘men-people’ from enjoying my art.” One of those men-people intrigued by her, in fact, is independent-theater director Jonathan Ferguson (of Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban fame).

After collecting several of Davis’s artworks, Ferguson recruited her to collaborate on his original production at the Southern Theater in February, You’re My Favorite Kind of Pretty. In addition to incorporating her sense of candy surrealism into the play’s set design, Davis has also created several large new works that will be integrated into the action on stage.

The play marks the culmination of a busy winter for Davis, who’s also displaying her work in a two-woman show this month (with friend Amy Crickenberger Oeth) at the Rosalux Gallery. The title of the show, “News From the Moon,” suggests the child-like fascination with celestial worlds that seems so prevalent in Davis’s work. Except in her universe, the moon isn’t made of cheese, but something sweeter. Like taffy.