Thankfully, some artists in Minneapolis know how to chuckle with a bit more levity. Ruben Nusz and Andy DuCett, members of the Rosalux collective, both possess fine-tuned appetites for cheekiness. They team up this month for "Pointing in All Directions at Once," a droll new exhibition that offers guileless humor with a contemplative twist.

Nusz's trademark image, "Scotty Gets a Job," is an archetype of unpretentious wit. The realistic composition of acrylic paint mimics the art-house integrity of black-and-white photography. The painting initially appears to be a close-up portrait of a man's face, frozen in an ambivalent squint. But a closer look reveals a rash of tiny red "sale dots"-- stickers used on artwork labels to indicate that a piece has been sold -- spreading over its surface like an acne outbreak. The garishly synthetic pimples contaminate the altruism of the painting beneath, and the portrait shifts from a high-minded effort at capturing a meditative moment to a cynical critique of art-as-commodity. Even more deliciously ironic, the piece has been sitting in Rosalux's gift shop, unsold, for many months.

If this seems a teeny bit too clever, Nusz's new hodgepodge of sculpture, painting, video and photography will come off as more viewer-friendly; it keeps a safer distance from subtlety, teetering between innocent joking and earnest subversion. A plastic gas can placed on a gallery pedestal continuously spouts water into a nearby bucket. A photograph shows a hot dog on a urinal with a pubic hair next to it. A set of "Taoist match books" includes instructions explaining how to burn.

With such a haphazard collection, the show's theme seems to be the rejection of theme, or at least a playful jab at efforts to organize art into neat theoretical boxes. DuCett piggybacks this idea with a sample of his "A Conversation About Something," a patchwork quilt of about 400 zip-top plastic bags, each filled with seemingly random found materials (an image of catalog models, an old Schlitz beer label, a photo of Dick Cheney). The project skewers the idea of art taxonomy, and remains visually chaotic despite the businesslike presentation of the plastic compartments.

DuCett also contributes a series of immensely entertaining photo collages. After cutting out illustrated characters found in flea-market magazines and old Cub Scout manuals, DuCett superimposed them over vintage Polaroids from the late 1960s. The characters -- cartoon adolescents possessing a Hardy Boys level of wholesomeness -- become actors in jarringly out-of-context scenes. A boy in a scuba mask peers into a living room window, and a young bowler on a highway tosses his ball at a car's windshield. The contrast between the characters' clean lines and the washed-out colors of the Polaroids results in a surreal animation-like quality, and the blatan t datedness of both elements pokes fun at the perceived goodness of nostalgia.

The nature of time transfixes artists Andy DuCett and Ruben Nusz in “Pointing in All Directions at Once,” their new exhibit at Rosalux Gallery. DuCett, whose work will be featured in an upcoming Midwest edition of New American Paintings, tackles our struggle with the passage of time in intricate drawings and a 400-collage project. Nusz’s take is decidedly darker, but just as profound.

While the majority of civilization struggles to draw a straight line, some lucky artists were born with multiple creative talents. Throughout August, Rosalux Gallery is featuring the drawings, photos, videos, paintings and collages of artists Andy DuCett and Ruben Nusz. The pair address similar topics from contrasting angles — such as loss versus attachment — while maintaining an overall theme of the human struggle with time.

Despite the exhibition’s intense subject matter, many of the pieces will have onlookers smiling. DuCett, an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, incorporates humor into his work, exploring how moments in his own life overlap with those who are living within the same system.
His ongoing project, “Conversations about Something” consists of roughly 400 collages made from founds items, displayed in zip-topped bags. Viewers can check out other people’s junk while thinking about the memories and ideas behind their own.

Nusz takes a similar approach in his half of the exhibit. Exploring bodily, materialistic and ideological attachments in our society, he presents numerous photographs of people, icons and objects that are broken down and lost. One Polaroid snapshot examines a piece of burnt bread labeled “Jesus Toast.” Another photo, titled “Basement Monster,” captures a small Christmas tree in a storage room with a plastic bag pulled over its tip like a pillowcase. Nusz will also show videos about decay and a collection of Taoist matchbooks.