Lisa Brawn Woodcuts
At the JEM Gallery until September 2

Dedicated to exhibiting lowbrow and outsider art, the JEM Gallery is a cheerful and inclusive place. Its walls, shelves, and glass cases are chock full of easy-to-read paintings, prints, drawings, small sculptures, and jewellery.

The work displayed in the gallery’s back room communicates many moods and stances, from smart and sassy to funky, fraught, and silly. Still, there are too many girlie images-impossibly shapely women with big boobs and teensy clothes. They’re neither funny nor empowering.

On view in JEM’s main gallery is a higher order of accessible art: woodcuts by Calgary artist Lisa Brawn. Her images of popular-culture cowboys, corporate-culture dweebs, and vamps with graffiti-style mustaches are both quirky and decorative.

Much of the appeal here is in Brawn’s use of patterning. Backgrounds filled with stripes, waves, knots, crosses, stylized stars and flowers, concentric swirls, and radiant lines speak to the ancient human impulse to embellish plain surfaces and ordinary beings.

Brawn’s dedication to the woodcut medium is revealed in the engraved and routed blocks themselves. Yes, she pulls small editions of mostly monochrome prints from her cherry, black-walnut, and Douglas-fir materials. However, she then paints the wooden blocks in rich hues and mounts them on the wall as the main feature of her show.

The Douglas fir she uses has been rescued from century-old buildings. In her artist’s statement, Brawn describes this material as “ornery”; she also chooses to work with the evidence of its previous life, the “holes, knots, gouges, and rusty nails”.

Her pop-art focus is on faces, many derived from photographs, old and new. For instance, her “Honky-Tonkin’ Honey Baby” series extols the charms of movie, television, and musical cowboys. (It also reflects the rustic and rugged nature of the recycled wood.) Included here are silent-film star Tom Mix, 1940s good guy Henry Fonda, 1950s family-values couple Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, 1970s tough guy Charles Bronson, and country-and-western legends Wilf Carter, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams (Sr. and Jr.).

Just as she taps into the strong appeal of decorative motifs, Brawn understands the lasting attraction of the cowboy myth: slap a Stetson on a handsome man and his charisma doubles. So do connotations of toughness, manliness, and resourcefulness.

Still, the title of one of these “Honky-Tonkin’” works, Pansy Patch, subverts the cowboy cliché, suggesting a Brokeback Mountain subtheme to the private lives behind the public pictures.

In a tip of her 10-gallon hat to Marcel Duchamp, Brawn also takes glee in undermining notions of glamour. Duchamp famously drew a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa; in her “Femmes ”¦ Moustache” series, Brawn draws similar black lines on the upper lips of vamps old and new.

Images of Theda Bara, Ava Gardner, Angelina Jolie, and Brawn’s friends, associates, and ex-lovers all play a stereotype-deflating game. It’s a nifty antidote to the girlie pics in the back of the gallery.