Each artist concentrated on the contours of the human face in the sculptures and paintings at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery’s exhibit last Saturday night. The exhibit features sculptures by Elisha Gold and paintings by Dawn Black. It will continue through April 30 at the warehouse district gallery.

Gold, a 23-year-old student at William Carey College in Mississippi, said he’s always been drawn to constructing objects.

“I was building forts and tree houses,” Gold said of his childhood.

Dawn Black, a 29-year-old native of Baton Rouge, said her parents were also supportive and she’s been seriously painting for 16 years.

From a single object, usually found in a scrap yard, Gold envisions an entire sculpture.

Clean lines and smooth surfaces are Gold’s signature style. Sculptures always include a mold of a real human face as the centerpiece, eyes closed, creating a sense of serenity or thoughtfulness and also helping to soften the image – a pair of staring eyes can be too intense for viewers. His found objects add to the piece by creating activity around the face, which ranges from horns to hubcaps to engine and drain parts.

“I use found objects that aren’t supposed to be welded together, so I have to figure out how to fit them together – Lego-mastery,” said Gold.

He introduces color and texture to his surreal, industrial sculptures using an array of metals: steel, bronze plate and even a small piece of meteorite. Gold also said that because most of his pieces include one-of-a-kind finds, he’s constantly having to work forward and can’t backtrack.

Like sculptures, paintings evolve and are created by layers. Black said she typically spends 20 to 30 hours on a piece, working in thin layers and on three to four pieces at a time.

Her paintings all show a single woman, softly adorned with fabrics or a headdress, a style typically reminiscent of Renaissance or Japanese paintings. The stark contrasts of the pale faces and the rich colors surrounding them draw in the observer and make him or her wonder what the women are doing and thinking. Black takes inspiration from magazine pictures of women with various cultural backgrounds and from historic time periods.

“It comes from my desire to find out for myself,” Black said of her paintings’ message about women’s history.

Gold’s exhibit included several pieces, from his first sculpture to “Siren,” his piece that he said won first place at the Mississippi College Art Competition.

Black’s exhibit features a large selection of paintings she began last November. She said that although this is her first two-person show in New Orleans, she has had two of her pieces in the No Dead Artist Show.

Additional art featured in the back half of the gallery includes flowing paintings by Robert Ortiz, bronze and glass leaves by Daisuke Shintani, paintings and sculptures by Damian Aquiles and other artists.

Naomi King can be reached at [email protected].