Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette "Sunset" is by Clayton Merrell, the Pittsburgh Center for the ArtsArtist of the Year. Click photo for larger image. Artist of the Year Emerging Artist of the Year Where:Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 6300 Fifth Ave., Shadyside. When: Through Nov. 6; 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $6, children $3, members free. Catalog: full-color reproductions of several works by each artist and biographical notes ($10). Information: 412-361-0873 or www.pittsburgharts.org.

Clayton Merrell's painting, at least that of recent years, has consistently shown an affinity for the land -- not through realistic representation but by depicting a landscape of locale informed by past and present visual and remnant imprints of human activity and of nature.

A 2004-05 fellowship in Roswell, N.M., only intensified his perceptivity, making his "Artist of the Year 2005" exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts as spectacular as the grand expanses of the Southwest that inspired many of the works in it.

Humans devise cosmologies to secure a sense of place within an unfathomable universe. These are constructed, in various periods and cultures, by shaman or astronomer, creationist or anthropologist, among others, and this is the territory that Merrell probes.

Paintings of cloud-filled skies or star-speckled nights, edged fully or sparsely with tiny stylized or representational trees, project an illusion of vastness. They call to mind time spent lying outdoors and looking upward, visualizing creatures in the clouds or filling in the dots of constellations.

Merrell seems to assign credibility to that imaginative wandering, infusing it with a mature intellectual's query. His musing is less "What can I imagine?" than "What might I intuit if I listen with all senses open?"

Because his visual subject is the land in all of its manifest grandeur -- including that tortured and scarred by man's intrusions -- there is present an element of the sublime and of the cautionary favored by the Hudson River School painters, though so contemporized they wouldn't recognize the comparison. Possibly. But that's another discussion.

Man, implied, is minute but an integral part of this complex system, which is the source of both his apprehension and his sustenance, physical and spiritual. In Merrell's visions, time and space are merged, reconfigured and re-prioritized. From the shuffling, new possibilities emerge.

An amphitheater-sized bull's-eye interrupts the denuded, sun-seared Western panorama of "Epicenter" -- the result of an earthquake? Meteor strike? Nuclear blast?

The fiery central mass of "Sunset" seems to speak more to the end of history than the gentle close of day. Is there another reading to this glowing, ray-emitting light, which more benignly dominates "Everything/Nothing Tangle"? Might it be God rather than some terrible force; or, are those equivalent in a time that continually asks "Why?" The pearlescent exploding cloud permeated by thin orange rays of "Sudden Cloud" suggests an apparition, possibly dangerous but alluring through its regal beauty.

Merrell has established a vocabulary of symbols, such as those preceding, to represent that which hasn't been codified. Sinewy yellow wisps enter the frame and begin to settle upon the golden-lit, bronzed canyons of "Golden Haze" suggesting more than a shift in humidity. A fireworks-like spray of yellow teardrop shapes erupts on the surface of the circular "Leaking Sky," an astronaut's view of earth endangered.

The works' dreamy surfaces are underscored with low-key intensity; they're subtle yet powerful.

The 16 small egg tempera on carved panel paintings of the superb and elegant "Desert Icon Series" read like a poem, an ode to the West, one measured meter after another succinctly presenting a visual manifestation of a characteristic component of desert.

"White Sands Panorama," a small square of blue sky and wispy clouds surrounded by a heavily carved plaster frame glossed with burnished white clay, draws the viewer in like the ornate gilded frames of small 19th-century paintings or, obversely, the "Skyspaces" of contemporary James Turrell. It's one of many exceptional three-dimensional wall pieces that combine painted panels with carved wooden or plaster elements.

Among many other works to note are "Six Copper Mines," six small copper panels banded with the geometry of excavation; several "peeled paintings" that began life as 360-degree panoramas painted on spheres or hemispheres ranging in size from eggshell to 6 feet in diameter; and the small sculptures "Dirtball Sky" and "Eggshell Sky," half atmosphere-enveloped planet, half earthbound object.

The 100 works spread through eight galleries elate, challenge, calm, pleasure, suggest and, most edifyingly, surround with an aesthetic that manages to be at once primal and sophisticated.

A Pittsburgh native who grew up in Venezuela and earned an MFA from Yale, Merrell is associate professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. It's good to have him back in town.

Emerging Artist of Year

In 2001, the center began awarding an exhibition to an "Emerging Artist of the Year" to run concurrently with the prestigious historic exhibition.

This year's awardee is Hilary Shames, who's taught at several universities and is currently with Carlow. She has exhibited internationally and is a member of Group A and Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors. Such achievement begs the question of what is an "emerging" artist, a definition center assistant director Laura Domencic says is still evolving.

That Shames employs a variety of techniques and media indicates a contemporary sensibility and willingness to push edges, but displaying all of them makes her three overfull galleries resemble a BFA show. "Prayer Flags" hung across one room look more like laundry than ritual item and obfuscate the other works in the room, the digital prints on a wooden sculpture are peeling, and a large yarn and wood hanging seems a '60s holdover.

What really shines, and deserves emphasis, are her vibrant color usage and brushstroke, fluid and animated on canvas or when re-interpreted digitally. Paintings "Green Jade" and "Red Jade" are lush. Hung in arrangement with smaller digital prints of details of the originals, they call attention to illusory boundaries; distinctions between brush and print, original and reproduction, canvas and paper; and the significance of the artist's hand to the valuation of a work.

Imagery resulting from props she designs are most effective and could become signature, as with the mysterious, color-infused digital photographs and montages from her April 15 and July 6 "Prayer Flags" projects, or the dramatic, intriguing digital montages from "Branching" projects of June 23 and 25 and July 2 and 4.