Photo By Manifest Gallery

Tim Parsley offers up a self portrait on display as part of Manifest Gallery's It's in Your Head exhibition.

Immediately arresting, a great gray-ish head suspended at eye level in the middle of Manifest Gallery's front room sets the tone for a small show of large scope. For the exhibition, It's in Your Head, artists consider that recurrent subject, the human head, and viewers are invited to do the same.

The head, says curator Jason Franz, "is the cockpit for our intellectual database, our conceptual drive train," putting portraiture squarely into today's world and suggesting that it still has a lot to show us.

That suspended, over-sized stoneware head -- its painted skin touched by pink, its tight hair and generous lips a little African -- is probably masculine but not definitively so. Humanity itself is the subject.

The head turns slightly to its left, we see a suggestion of shoulder; it looks through and past anyone entering the gallery. Its thoughts are elsewhere. Artist Collin Moses, from Bloomington, Ind., calls the work "We Are Not."

The exhibition's 18 works by 12 artists were culled from over 300 entries, originating in 25 U.S. states and five other countries, says Franz. He is pleased and a little surprised at the response, which outstrips previous calls for entries at Manifest. Most works are from 2006, the earliest is 2004 and the most recent were made this year.

Cincinnatian Tim Parsley's delicately executed drawings of himself (hat covering all hair) and "Aaron," whose hair defines his appearance, are shown flanking two portraits by another Cincinnatian, Rick Finn. Finn's works are hung one above the other, their subjects are men apparently serving time. Finn's reduction woodcuts, a process that requires multiple impressions, contrast with Parsley's graphite renderings, a juxtaposition typical of this thoughtful installation.

At right of the Parsley/Finn portraits are two large pastels by Michael Nichols from Bowling Green, Ky. Nichols is the second place winner in Manifest's National Drawing Annual, which is on view in the next room. His drawings in It's in Your Head, one of a young man and the other a young woman, glow with color. That of the man suggests successive time frames.

Gary Duehr, an artist from Massachusetts, puts tongue in cheek to show tooth in mouth -- a pigment print on watercolor paper, "Self Portrait With Root Canal," which depicts the ghostly interior of Duehr's own mouth as seen by X-ray in uncomfortable detail. Size is a factor here; the blown-up print presents a mouth large enough to eat you.

Our bodies' willful alterations, some self-imposed and some not, are the subject of Lexington, Ky., artist Ruth Adams' inkjet prints showing herself with long hair on Jan. 1, with shorter hair on Jan. 4, and with a bald head on June 5.

Greg Jones, from Sylvania, Ohio, literally turns representation on its head. He unites two male and two female portrait heads in oil on canvas into an X -- men lower left and top right, the women lower right and top left, each of them slanted upside down. Background for the women is pink, for the men blue, suggesting we hang on to stereotyping longer than we should?

Centerville, Ohio, artist Andrew Dailey takes on male fascination with tools in a direct fashion in a trio of small panels, 6 or 8 inches square, in grays and blacks. Each shows a man's head interacting with a hammer, bolts or other implements in a most unnatural way. The subject's face is serious, and it's clear that tools are more than they seem.

Photo By Manifest Gallery

Andrew Dailey's work takes on male fascination with tools.

Although the work is hung at the spot where an orderly viewer might begin -- closest to the street on the left side of the gallery -- Cincinnatian Ted Kauflin's "Transformation" would conceptually make the perfect ending to the show. A digital metallic print on photographic paper, layers of color rise from dark to light at the top. When we look at Kauflin's print, we see ourselves reflected.

Is this what we've been searching for all the time -- ourselves, but transformed by an artist's beautiful, glimmering tones? It's enough to send you away bemused and happy. Grade: B+