It’s food, it’s art, it’s an experience

Friday, July 20, 2007 | 7:23 a.m.

What: Wendy Kveck and Loo Bain

Where: Main Gallery, 1009 S. Main St.

When: Through July 28

Information: 257-6246 or www.wendykveck.carbonmade.com

There is nothing quite so delicious, alarming, beautiful, horrifying, engaging and disturbing as an exhibit of paintings by Wendy Kveck.

Her work ties together food ritual, consumption and representations of women historically in art and in contemporary media.

For a while, her expressive portraits delivered a poignant response to our oversaturated media culture , obsessed with glamour and ideas of beauty and desire.

Then came the food.

It began as background in her figurative works, evolved into videos of women's faces covered with lunch meat or frosting (woman consuming and woman being consumed), then became raw textured paintings.

Kveck put on quite a show as the featured local artist at the Americans for the Arts annual conference this spring at the Flamingo. She had a pianist performing an intensely suspenseful piece while four masked women ate salads. One gnawed on a head of lettuce. Others dined politely with utensils. Often such "rituals of consumption" come with vomitoriums where the food is spit up.

Kveck's recent work, on display at Main Gallery, is part of an experimental progression that took her to less representational works while she played with material. Sensuous and textured, the paintings are layered with colors, food, paint globs and frosting forms created with pastry bags filled with paint. They drip, ooze and shift under the heat and the lights. Cookies, candies, Cheetos and whipped marshmallow cream drip through mounds of paint.

Her confection series lines the wall. The 4-by-4-inch paintings, dressed like little cakes, carry individual traits and personalities: sunny, dark, mysterious , suave, bloody.

Included in the exhibit are works from her "How Much Do You Really Need" series featured in her master of fine arts thesis exhibit at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. Although the works are mostly delightful and cheery, darker themes and scabby wounds permeate.

But calling these works abstract is too much of a stretch for Kveck.

"It really still feels very figurative to me in terms of body, flesh and aging," the artist says while at the gallery, which is also featuring sculptures by Chicago artist Loo Bain.

"I also like when they're not so delicious looking," she says.