Greg Ewing is a young artist who...

Greg Ewing is a young artist who brings a lot of intelligence, energy and imagination, not to mention a little poetry and wit, to painting. Ten of his recent works are now on view in the Sushi lobby (852 8th Ave.).

For the most part, Ewing uses brightly colored symbolic forms on solid fields. “Modern Man” includes stylized images of the sun, man and a trail of sperm; “Dinosaur Cartoon,” shows a dinosaur, Adam and Eve with a snake, a black sun and crosses; “Death in the Fifth Position” depicts a balletic skeleton with the wounds and halo of Christ, palm trees, crosses and a gray moon. Despite the readability of the images, interpreting them in relationship to one another takes some effort and even then there is substantial residual enigma. Still, whether you can decipher them or not, the paintings are visually satisfying works of art.

Ewing’s themes are concerns we all have--survival, love, sex, death and the meaning of it all, if any.

“This guy’s got an ax to grind, but he’s got a sense of humor, too,” a visitor commented about the show.

The variations in style among the works evince youthful searching for a mature, unique vision. There is promise here, however. There has to be in someone who would say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and I’ll make them a painting.”

The exhibit continues through Jan. 31.

The Jung Center (3525 Front St.) is exhibiting Cibachrome photographs by Orange County-based artist Roger Camp.

Titled as a group “Post Modern Women,” the images, combining views of nude female torsos with shards of broken glass and mirrors and other materials, suggest seductiveness and vulnerability, sharpness and danger.

The common components become enigmatic in Camp’s compositional juxtapositioning of them as they flicker back and forth between recognizability and abstraction.

Overall there is a sadness to these beautiful photographs, which suggest the fragmentation either of woman or of man’s vision of her.

The exhibit continues through Jan. 30.

Circle Gallery in Old Town (2501 San Diego Ave.) is exhibiting a variety of materials from Walt Disney Productions, most notably original cels (or unit drawings) from animated Disney films. A film can require as many as 24 such drawings per second of action. In recent years, the efforts of the Disney artists--Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, for example--have received recognition as an indigenous, contemporary American art form worthy of serious regard. In addition to his profound influence on popular culture, Disney has affected contemporary artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Terry Allen and Lari Pittman.

It is impossible to resist the engaging images of so many familiar characters, including Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.

Most of the materials on view are reproductions in a variety of forms, including serigraphs, posters and books.

A few of the films represented are “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “Song of the South,” “Winnie the Pooh” and “The Jungle Book.”

The exhibit continues through Feb. 2.

Tarbox Gallery (1202 Kettner Blvd.) is showing paintings by Dickens Chang. Impatient with the traditional art instructional methods of his native China, he turned to the art of the West. He has made his career on the West Coast but recently moved to New York. Imagery of these areas--California vineyards, New York skyscrapers--and of others, including Jamaica, appear in several of the paintings.

For the most part, however, Chang focuses on voluptuous women with firm breasts and thighs in semitransparent garb.

The exhibit continues through Jan. 31.