Some artists are so caught up in visual language that they don't know how to talk about their own work. John Wood is not one of those people. Upon entering the Memorial Art Gallery's Lockhart Gallery, viewers are provided with a wall plaque that contains a 1977 statement by the artist: "I would like my pictures to be abstract/ And poetic visual images/ Of friends and the world/ No story telling/ Sometimes slight propaganda and quiet protest/ On the edge of clear meaning." His words are enough to make any critic back away from trying to trump his own concise analysis of his work. But then I disagreed with something else I read, so I'll endeavor.

The running themes in the retrospective of Wood's work are flight, the perspective from the sky, a fondness of the earth, and very subtle commentary on the destruction we cause. His art is influenced by his time as an Air Force pilot, as well as his fascination with the flight experiments of the Wright Brothers. The show includes photographs, mixed-media drawings, and five rough and folksy duck sculptures. All entitled "Whirligig," each carved and painted wooden bird has a found-object propeller attached to its rear, and little pin-hole eyes. Wood's 2D work reflects his time spent in the sky, the bird's eye perspective serving to abstract the landscapes below into edge-blurring sweeps color and groupings of shapes.

In the "Assateague" series of drawings, free and meandering bright crayon and graphite landscapes remind me of children's doodles, uninhibited by strictly enforced ideas of form and spatial relationships. But there is a too-conscious appreciation of the patchwork flow of land and the lapping and ebbing motion of the sea against that land. The artist clearly kept his sense of awe about the concept of flight: humans busting through their innate limitations, the remarkable, yet disorienting, result of our capacity to adamantly soar. But he makes you feel the off-ness of flight, the vertigo.

Other drawings focus on the harsher realities of our abilities to overpower nature. In "Thoughts on Nuclear Waste Disposal," the artist has white washed over a sick green hue, but the cover is failing and we can perceive a violent and dangerous yellow seeping through it. Two cube forms are scratched out over the surface of the white, weak attempts at containing the hazard. Or perhaps the scene is a poisoned earth with blocky nuclear facilities peeping though low-lying cloud cover. The accompanying info-card quotes the artist's thoughts that, "It is not enough to point a finger at politicians or corporations or the army [...] in a democracy, we are all responsible for what happens."

Not every piece is politically charged - some are simply studies in form and line. The untitled lacquer and solvent drawings resemble organic chemistry; in fact, the artist thinks of the drawings "as being related to natural systems, such as the formation of crystals or the growth of fractals." In these pieces, zones of inky fluid are frozen in the act of bleeding, caught in mid-expansion, just like crystals.

But I was most drawn to five ominous works that, though simple in form and composition like lacquer drawings, have a heavier undertone. The untitled mixed-media and ink-on-paper drawings are accompanied by a statement that, "In 1963, Wood made a series of drawings with a recurring mushroom-cloud motif. When asked if they were a response to atomic jitters in a post-Bay of Pigs world, he acknowledged the constant anxiety during that period, but said he prefers to think of them as tree forms."

I'm sorry to contradict you, Mr. Wood, but I disagree. Sure, I see the resemblance. It's nice to think of them as trees: an explosive column ending not in smoke, but in downy, leafy life, but the seed suggestion of nuclear destruction has already taken root, and as a weed, withered any trees-of-life-thoughts in my mind.

The vague wasteland imagery surrounding the "trees" further signifies the lack of life. In one of the five drawings, a faint dome shape at the bottom of the page resembles the curve of the world as seen from space, with countless streams of ink explosions surging upward, off the page, like an out of control oil well or the angry earth upturned by a billion explosions. On another page, an ominous tornado mess swirls, turning on itself, scrambling black with a moody thundercloud blue.

Yet another drawing shows a ghost of a flash: a light bulb form dominates a black and gray ground, and far out in the distance, a desolate horizon makes the ashy, barren foreground seem all the more bleak. The last of the group contains a black body of thick, suffocating smoke with a white outline. About an inch from the top, a blurry haze of white (our fragile atmosphere?) separates the wasteland from the vacuum of space. The land might as well be the surface of the moon, it so resembles a cold nighttime desert. Are these glimpses of our future? Maybe I'm just projecting my own political anxiety onto the art.

See the companion exhibits celebrating John Wood's photographic career at the George Eastman House and Visual Studies Workshop, running October 18-January 11.

On the Edge of Clear Meaning

By John Wood

Through January 11

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave

$4-$10 | 276-8900 | mag.rocheser.edu

Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday until 9 p.m.