Plodding feet and murmuring voices mingle up the gallery stairs. Students Alvin, Ben, Chad and Matt have arrived from local community building organization Starfire and settle in front of laptops loaded with their digital photos as another day of art education begins at Prairie Gallery.  

The Covington home of artist Jeremy Johnson is a frozen menagerie. Hollow skulls cast a shade of the macabre on the dining room-turned-dissection studio.  

What’s a nice girl like Emily Brandehoff doing making gory paintings like this? Young sweethearts look as if they’re from Our Town, except they’re chewing one another to a pulp.   

Why are Hollywood glamour photographs on display at the Taft Museum of Art? FotoFocus isn’t reason enough; the Taft likes to establish a tie between the renowned permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. So what is Myrna Loy doing here?   

 Drawing comparisons is a futile way to describe Blue Man Group. It’s a unique form of entertainment that includes music, electronica, childish gross-outs and silliness that owes a lot to the physicality Three Stooges and the silent slapstick of Harpo Marx.   

Shooting outdoors separated photographer Herb Ritts from studio-based New York peers. In addition to Malibu and El Mirage, Ritts used a rooftop studio. He established a fun, “organic” working environment, enabling him to cajole his subjects and develop an “anti-glamour” style of celebrity photography.  

Tyler Shields’ Klout Score is probably through the roof. Although he is prone to superlatives, someone less familiar with his work might find this statement mere braggadocio. But Shields credits his online presence as the reason he is so successful as a multi-disciplinary artist.   

The god in Manifest Gallery’s Deus Ex Machina does not arise from the traditional machine (that crane elevating a Greek actor of ancient times to meet a plot need for divine intervention), but instead from our handy modern device, the camera.   

It’s appropriate that Project Obscura at Northside’s Prairie Gallery opened before FotoFocus officially kicks off Oct. 5. After all, the camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”) led to the modern camera.  

Manifest’s latest addition is the Manifest Artist Residency. Annually, beginning in July each year, Manifest will host a working artist in the studio facility inside the gallery building.