"Black Cat Girl": By Kirk Bangus, earthware.

Beauty and function are the poles of ceramic art. No word in English mixes implications of loveliness and detachment like the word "glaze," for instance. Yet the innately practical nature of clay vessels, echoing the form and capacities of the human body, possesses a hearty intimacy rivaled only by pets, or lunch. Wrapped around the potent vacancy of interior space, drawing and painting, pattern and color spread over the outer skin of polished, hardened earth like a blush.

The three artists at the show Three of a Kind at Tremont's Asterisk Gallery are essentially sculptors and painters, as well as ceramicists, but such syntheses have always been the soul of the craft. Candy Depew and Thomas Bartel studied with Kirk Mangus, long-time head of the ceramics department at Kent State University, during their undergrad years, and this show reunites them, comparing and contrasting the different ways in which ceramic design principles extend through space, exploring physical and conceptual dimensions.

As paterfamilias, Mangus' drawings and sculptures preside over the gallery, continuing this artist's career-long satyricon — a lighthearted but intensely expressive masked ball of polymorphous animal and human characters. Such figures have frolicked out of his kilns and off his drawing board since Mangus took over Kent's ceramic studio in the mid 1980s; amazingly they've lost none of their engaging, sometimes erotic energies. At Asterisk, his caricature-like heads are nominally jugs, with ear handles and a spout at the top. "Dog Mama"'s big blue human eyes peer out from behind their canine mask with innocent glee. But "Blue Bunny" and "Black Cat Girl" display a predatory twinkle that seems more demonic than otherwise. Mangus' figures are haunted by the energies of myth and animism, twirling in a fiery dance as they emerge from imaginative depths and the heart of the ceramicist's furnace.

Western Kentucky University associate professor Thomas Bartel's arrestingly grotesque heads and body parts also evoke myth and mania, and the psychopathology of disguise. The mixed media "Drag Dead" is the most vividly conceived of three works hanging at intervals along one section of the gallery's west wall. A frazzled off-blonde wig, green eye shadow and rouge-like glaze (oozing like bloody slime from the corner of the mouth), plus an aged, cracked layer of encaustic built onto the face, add up to an offbeat realism that makes the nearly life-size face and neck all but jump at the viewer. Its long-dead-looking eyes gaze into an eternity well beyond the safety of irony or satire. That it is so much like a severed head, a trophy hung high as if for crowds to mock, is profoundly unsettling. There is a sense in Bartel's work that physical presence has been stretched, and ultimately snapped, isolated from daily experience and rediscovered in the variable proportions and uncertain gravity of dream.

In the center of the same wall, a darkly russet-toned bust titled "Horizontal Figure" juts into the room, as if a person about the size of a child were lying on its back. Located a little below eye level, it seems to cast a blue-painted shadow up the wall; two real shadows from the gallery's spots fork out below it. Like Bartel's other depictions, this personage, decorated with round blue dots that match and echo its painted shadow, is gender non-specific, signaling an energetic presence that precedes and perhaps transcends sexual interaction. As in Mangus' works, angelic or demonic realms are invoked, but in Bartel's case imagery is supplemented with unusual spatial display techniques that suggest the intersection of a fourth dimension.

Candy Depew's often lushly decorative works in paint, silkscreen, and mixed media also extend the notion of adornment, spinning imagery out from the specific surface of an art object or human body into the space it occupies. Depew, who is based in Philadelphia and New York and exhibits and teaches internationally, flirts with visual conditions of comfort and distraction and she confronts some of life's big issues, in particular the death of her father last year. Silk- screen works on view, which are stretched like canvases and feature blithe depictions of flowers and fish, are sections of a larger panel originally displayed as backdrop to a performance in Philadelphia at Crane Art's ICEBOX Projects Space earlier this year. At Asterisk, leaves and flowers continue past the edges of some of these sampled fabric patterns, running down the wall. Many themes are touched on in Depew's multi-layered, performance-oriented works, which also persist outside the frame of any particular exhibit, crisscrossing through her travels and experiences. "Blood Diamonds," as an example, consists of a white dinner plate with red geometric vinyl decals of diamonds and a brooch-like green flourish. Beneath the plate a larger, silkscreened diamond is stuck directly on the wall, followed by stylized red drops which spatter down to the baseboard, coagulating in a large puddle on the gallery floor. Among the issues considered in this and other works are questions about how gender identity and its signifiers - jewelry, of course, and also the whole of what the artist, in a play on her own name, calls "candy-coating" - intersect harsh economic realities. Love and its calculations are everywhere intertwined with cruelty and death. In such a world, made fatally ambiguous with every culture's cosmetic deceptions, Depew sides with the beautiful. She intends to fund a magazine called candycoated, in part by selling a line of decorated panties and other intimate apparel branded as "moneymaker$." One of these, attached to an orange feather boa, curls appealingly in a corner of the front gallery.

Thomas Bartel also has a lighter side, revealed in his engaging work "Self Portrait Heart." Also spread out on the floor, the heart-shaped configuration measures about 5-by-7 feet and consists of several hundred small, crinkly-looking ceramic objects. The majority of these have a pale, weathered, crusty look. Some are like petrified donuts, others resemble crudely modeled shoes or cars. Many more are as teasingly unidentifiable as seaside flotsam. These are also intended as "moneymakers," though at the $1 dollar apiece price tag they're too affordable to amount to much more than good fun and a couple of tanks of gas for their maker. But more to the point, like other works here by all three artists, they remind us of the crowded tides of human things that wash through our lives, always embodying a fragment of mind and often dubious intent.

Three of a Kind: Through June 7, 2008, at Asterisk Gallery, 2393 Professor Ave., 330.304.8528.