For a long time now, captains of industry and their pocket politicians have been playing with our anxieties, our insecurities, and this has resulted in catastrophic world-changing events as well as tragic outcomes on individual levels. The current exhibit at Roberts Wesleyan's Davison Gallery challenges the asleep-at-the-wheel behavior of Americans, issuing a five-alarm wake-up call and a challenge to do better.

"War & Consumerism" is a collaboration of the work of Jeffrey Grubbs and Romy Hosford that draws crucial parallels between Grubbs's focus on war and Hosford's concerns with cultural consumerism. "For us this exhibition is a cautionary tale regarding the intersection of war and consumerism," Grubbs explains in the show's press release. "It is our hope this provocative show explores some of America's long-held cultural, ideological and moral beliefs."

In essence, the show tackles our complicated relationship with the world. The artists' work individually deals with two separate (and timely) fears that we have: the fear of a cataclysmic end of the world, and the fear of losing the securities and comforts we have acquired. Paired, the bodies of work indicate not only how, through our material demands, we are complicit in atrocity toward others and in our own downfall, but how greedy puppet masters play on our fears and insecurities, egging on our nastier traits while we sleepwalk through life.

Grubbs is associate professor and chair of the Division of Visual Arts at Roberts, and works in many media. Each work in this show is distinct in style, serving the concepts the artist seeks to convey, regarding current global sociopolitical and -economic events. Various works echo humanity's near obsession with the end of the world, informed by our pseudo understanding of various religious prophecies.

On a massive canvas, Grubbs has built up an ominous acrylic and latex sky, crude-oil-colored and ready to trounce the living hell out of the tiny city below. Entitled "Day of Clouds," the work is accompanied by a bible open to Zephaniah 2:2, warning of the fierce anger of the lord. "Shock and Awe" echoes the destruction, a monotype with graphite and dye on paper, black on black, a mushroom cloud.

"2 Timothy 2:14" is a work of thickly applied oil on masonite, with two semi-abstract, blazingly colored figures yelling at one another, paired with a passage: "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self discipline." This work sets the tone for the show for me, in that the opposite of love is a consuming, unbridled fear that, when untempered by our own will and sense, does not allow us to see others clearly, and act accordingly.

Further back into the gallery, Grubbs gets political. "Black Gold" is a monotype black-on-black work on paper, depicting skeletons of adults and children trapped in oil, like extinct creatures, doomed by our reliance on it.

On the wall opposite from "Day of Clouds" is the equally mammoth woodcut-on-paper work, "Military Industrial Complex." The red stripes bear patterns of bombs, guns, money, the smoking twin towers of the World Trade Center, soldiers, tanks, and planes, while the blue panel holds Eisenhower's portrait among the stars. Grubbs shifts his focus on foreshadowing to a more recent version in this work: nearby, an MP3 player and headset offers a part of Eisenhower's presidential farewell address, in which he prophetically warns Americans about the rise of the Military Industrial Complex. The danger of remaining permanently engaged in the production of armaments is that it causes permanent conflict. Eisenhower warned that wars would be created in order to keep the industry going.

Hosford is assistant professor of visual arts at Roberts, and works mainly in ceramics and fiber art, but includes elements of video installations in this show. While her work delves into the traditional expectations of women in relation to the home, the work particular to this show "explores ideas about consumerism in regards to the home and is a response to the housing crisis and the recent economic downturn," per the artist's statement.

Like so many Americans in the past few years, the invisible inhabitants of Hosford's domestic scenes have accumulated finery and watched it crumble, bereft of a sense of security. "The House and the Foreclosure" is a precarious stack of book-sized ceramic mattresses and pillows, decorated with pretty decals and stacked on a silver platter, topped with small house that is packed full with plaster flora.

"Stretched Thin" is a jarring work in which a fancy couch split down the middle is reconnected with exaggeratedly long and draping stitches. Miniature dollhouse furniture and trappings are caught in webby threads; the whole scene speaks of ill-at-ease domesticity, where the rift is ignored and filled in with more and more.

Hosford also contributed a photo series in which colorful and crumbling cakes have mini furniture poking into them, or tiny houses balanced on the frosting. Pick your cliché cake phrase - my mother was reminded of the sociopathic gem, "let them eat cake." In "Washed Up," a bathtub and sink are positioned next to a cake wall, which is crumbling into the tub.

In "The Things We Keep," a print of an alley between rows of storage sheds becomes the canvas for shifting images of curbed furniture, piles of wood, garbage bags, junk, and treasures, indicating that we possess so much that it has to be stored off-site, or simply thrown away as its value to us shifts.

Another claw-footed couch, entitled "Apart at the Seams," has its back ripped off and raised up, held by strings from the ceiling, with lace and plaster flowers affixed to the damaged seams. This work faces "God Bless This Mortgaged Home," a digital video projected into an ornate oval frame on the wall, which shows vignettes of destruction. In one scene, a house and a figurine couple are slowly flooded in a fish tank; in another, Monopoly houses tumble from the sky to crush the same pair.

Together, Grubbs and Hosford's works force us to contemplate the meaning of "freedom," and how the word is used rhetorically to sway us into certain actions and modes of living. The show is a vision of The End, opulence reduced to detritus, ready to be washed away in the flood, through no day of judgment is required. This is the result of living so desperately out of balance.

We all want and deserve the same thing - a good life and safety. Differences in human groups mean little but have been exploited so we can be divided and conquered, and so that the less obviously conquered don't feel too badly for the underdog. We believe that we have no control over the wars, but we do. We can vote with our dollars. We can live within our means, and thereby protect ourselves while not empowering massive banking corporations. We can research products and services and support ethical industries. We can refuse to support bad behavior.

Astute viewers of this show will leave in search of new definitions, and their own pathways. The artists are urging us to look closer at our lives and our actions. Before I left I wandered over to "Days of Glory," Grubbs' lovely oil-on-canvas depicting a sunset over a field of thick and glowing brushstrokes. Not immediately, I spied two fallen soldiers crumpled in the field. Nearby, a dead horse materialized, leading the eye to the trail of dead flowing all the way to the horizon.

"War & Consumerism"

By Jeffrey Grubbs and Romy Hosford

Through January 31

Davison Gallery, Roberts Wesleyan College, 2301 Westside Dr.

Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday 1-4 p.m.

594-6442 | roberts.edu/davisongallery