Mark Hosford's drawings and animation place children dressed up in costumes that are somehow archaic into scenes with puppets come to life, insect-like critters with human faces, masks grafted onto other objects, and oversized parasites. A drop of liquid may pass from one figure to the other in some sort of exchange or infection. The cartoon-like drawings of fantasies and nightmares bring to life taboos and "parts of the world we don't understand," as the artist explains it. He creates these fairy tales because of the special roles fairy tales have in expressing and shaping consciousness. People learn the rules by which the world works through fairy tales; the stories leave a strong mark because they are so memorable, and they allow you to put yourself in the shoes of the characters. This act of learning how to project yourself onto another character or person provides an important training in use of the imagination. Hosford has a lot of his work available for viewing on his Web site: www.paidthinkers.com.

Video art has been an arrival point for Julie Roberts. After working her way from two-dimensional work into sculpture, video with its fourth dimension of time seemed to offer the limitless possibilities she needed. Nashvillians can see Roberts' work at Zeitgeist and Ruby Green as part of the current "Empire Builders" group show. In a self-portrait at Ruby Green, Roberts enclosed herself in a sealed glass box during cold weather. She filmed herself as her breath turned into condensation on the glass, eventually whiting out the image. When the whiteout occurs, the tape loop reverses and traces its way back to the point when her image comes fully into focus. While the camera is on her, she passes through phases of expression, at times seeming to fall asleep, at others opening her eyes wide in panic. The video at Zeitgeist shows the doubled-up image of the same woman overlaid side by side on a bed. The figure on the left sleeps soundly, the one on the right changes position and fidgets constantly. At times the two figures overlap but never merge. These two works show Roberts' interest in psychology and the self. The self-portrait enacts an endless process of self-erasure and retrieval, and also represents the emergence of emotions as they express themselves on the surface. The dual portrait shows a fracturing of the self that never resolves, a person living perpetually as a doppelganger to herself. Like all video, her work concerns itself with time. The self-portrait in particular forces viewers out of their own rhythm and into a different gear in order to see within the pace of the video. Time in these works seems to take on physical dimensions.

The American West marks the work of Jack Dingo Ryan indelibly. He grew up in Portland, Ore., and went on to experiences like working as a fisherman in Alaska, where he occupied a cabin that had been the site of a double homicide in a previous season. He lived in the Northwest during the catastrophic explosion of Mount St. Helens. In response to the landscape around him and the complex history and events that played out there, Ryan has been fascinated with the idea of the sublime. The Romantic Era theory of the sublime held that when interacting with nature, people can achieve exalted states, but once in that state one discovers a demented, perverse presence. He also draws on Frederick Jackson Turner's description of the settling of the West as a "migration of misfits." In the West, beauty, perversity and violence run together. Ryan works with these ideas in exquisite drawings (he has extremely high skills as a draftsman), paintings, sculptural objects and installations, like a suitcase riddled with bullet holes or a swath of human ears mounted on two walls. The images and themes come from Western landscape, history and myth: mountains, volcanoes, glaciers, igloos, the abominable snowman and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, among others. His efforts to describe the sublime involve locating a position ambiguous in its relation to sanity and madness, mythic and factual reality.

Bryan Hunter grew up in small-town Tennessee, studied poetry and painting at Tennessee Tech while pursuing a degree in management of information systems, and got an MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In his paintings he pursues what he terms a punk sensibility, framing and juxtaposing images and styles to jar the viewer. His poetry bears the marks of a painter's consciousness in relying heavily on images thrown together from observation, memory and dreams, creating ambiguous conjunctions familiar to surrealism or Rauschenberg's combines. Sometimes his crisp accounts could be describing elements in a painting ("A man with keys is eating an onion like an apple"). Others take advantage of the power of words to capture what might be just past the range of visual depiction, like, "In a market in Saltillo, Mexico, I passed a table / covered with 50 pounds of beef liver. / The air was more blood than air." The poems move between memories of Tennessee and life in Chicago, collapsing distances in time and space. He writes with a sexual frankness and does not shy away from engaging the perversity that slips into human situations. This passage from his poem "Toxic Butter" seems to explain a method of expression, in which distorting the perception of experience reveals truth hidden in its margins:

My ilk has always preferred

distortions;

like with the warped glass of a peephole,

where seeing the rail across the

breezeway

as a level, straight line,

is sacrificed in favor of spotting

the man kneeling low by the door

with a knife.

Hunter avoids easy resolutions, preferring poems to have the ambiguity of paintings, which don't explain themselves, giving the reader the chance to find something new with each rereading. The Fugitive itself makes its way into Hunter's poetry. "Wankel Rotary Engine" describes the building on Houston Street and captures the pleasures of the place. The building itself is like one of his poems, and the world as we live it—full of curious details that we can never fully explain.

From "Wankel Rotary Engine," Spooky Actions at a Distance

Poem originally published in Preling

I've moved into a different studio;

a ridiculous old place with a boat

motor

hanging from one wall, and water

pipes running

alongside three-phase power on the

ceiling's timbers.

One pipe ends in a faucet which points

straight at a fuse box. There's a freight

elevator,

just in case a second floor is ever built.

A toilet on its drainpipe floats in midair

in the atoll of a rotted-out floor.

130 years of hard-to-figure human

decisions.