I was not impressed with the images on the invitation to the alumni art show at South Puget Sound Community College, but when I walked into the gallery I was pleasantly surprised. Not that it is all great - there are some pretty bland and traditional pastel and watercolor landscapes and a bunch of flower pictures I could easily live without, and some works that are intended to be funny but are meh.

But there is a lot of good stuff too.

Tim Kenny's photo-realist lithographs are striking and unique. Two of them picture men with what appears to be X-rays or sonograms of mechanical parts inserted into their bodies. (I recently had an angioplasty and saw the prints, and these images look a lot like the pictures of stents and grafts in my body.) There is also a Kenny lithograph of a hand and arm with a mechanical apparatus attached. These works are beautifully crafted and inventive.

I like Lea Mitchell's three tiny, dark acrylic landscapes, which teeter on the edge between abstraction and impressionism. Her graphite and pastel drawing "Touch" is a subtle and nicely balanced drawing of a hand touching a face.

Perhaps the most powerful piece in the show is Aimee Biggerstaff's "Malcolm," a ceramic head that is about three times life size. It's the head of an older man. He's bald and there is a series of nipple-like protrusions on the top of his head. It's a disturbing image, and I could probably never live with it if I owned it; but nobody ever said art has to be pretty or comfortable.

Also disturbing but in a lighter vein are Kensuke Yamada's stoneware and wood sculptures. Both stack human heads and other things in layers like meat and cheese and other makings in a hamburger. "Meet Me on the Hillside" is a sculpted hill with green grass and a red flower and a funny little bird on the crest. Underneath the hill are two charcoal-colored human heads lying on their cheeks atop wooden blocks and sandwiched between the blocks and the hill as if caught in a vise.

A similar piece by Yamada is "Sitting Here Wishing We Could Kick It" - another charcoal-colored head on top of a white ice cream cone, which is on top of a white cupcake. A sweet serving dessert and a head.

There are also two sculptural pieces by Robin Ewing I couldn't help but enjoy despite really juvenile attempts at humor. Her "Misfortune Cookies" comprises black fortune cookies on a white pedestal with very bad printed fortunes, some of which are insulting to whoever opens the cookies and some of which predict bad happenings such as "You're going to die." I like the abstract form and the idea of bad fortunes, but the humor of the printed fortunes failed to tickle my funny bone.

I had a similar reaction to Ewing's "Guide to Online Dating," glass pages fanned into a circular configuration with printed statements relative to dating, most of which were put-downs with insulting references to sexual performance and penis size. It's well crafted and the idea is a good one, but the humor doesn't quite come off.

SOUTH PUGET SOUND COMMUNITY COLLEGE, "THEN AND NOW: ALUMNI ART EXHIBIT," THROUGH MARCH 21, MONDAY-THURSDAY, NOON-4 P.M., AND BY APPOINTMENT, 2011 MOTTMAN RD. SW. OLYMPIA, 360.596.5527