Kansas City artist Betsy Barratt's work might be characterized as outsider art. She filters figures of pinup models and such tattoo subjects as blood-red roses, skulls and gilded scrollwork through a folk artist's sensibility. Immediate and striking, her archetypal subjects — calendar girls, Wonder Women and virgins Mary, often with ambiguous facial expressions — live within compositions that include text, ornate flora and marginalia that evoke illuminated manuscripts and bikers' tattoos. The exhibit, Out of the Looking Glass ... Into the Woods, with photography and video by Greg James Arendall, opens at 6 p.m. at the supersexy Slap-n-Tickle Gallery (504 East 18th Street, 816-716-5940).
Fri., Aug. 7, 6-10 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 8, 1-5 p.m., 2009
