The galleries are hopping at Summit Artspace, a Knight Arts grantee. On the first floor, the two-person exhibit “Adorned Spaces” will no doubt generate some audience. On the third floor, the open areas of the space are filled with a student exhibit from Kent State University seniors from the School of Visual Communication Design on photographic illustrations (the kind of thing used for magazine and perhaps billboard ads). In the back – where the two smaller rooms of the Box gallery are located – there is another two-person exhibit from artists Maggie Duff and Bernadette Houk.

These exhibits have the kind of out-there, different-slant art that makes them extremely worth a look.

Maggie Duff’s “Parade Bomb” has to do with undermining the traditional way of presenting landscape grandeur. In a sheet she has posted about her work, she comments that we are given a view of inexhaustible nature through rose-colored glasses, while the real natural landscape has been altered and depleted. It is all a glossed-over way of presenting information. She does her own take.

First off, for her 14 works (mostly two-dimensional mixed media pieces, plus collages of various kinds), Duff has created her own hand-drafted version of a road map to the names of the works. She made a drawing of the room on one side of a sheet of paper with numbers 1-14; on the other side she lists the names of the works by name. That’s not the usual when it comes to gallery displays.

Maggie Duff, “Sherwin Williams.” Photo by Roger Durbin

Two works give the sense of what she is about. One called “Sherwin Williams” does her spin on the idea of the slogan that the paint company covers the earth – and in a nice way. Her large board (66” x 48”) gives another view, as though the paint is drowning the world and leaving no green space.

In another work, she takes on the concept of “Manifest Destiny/Grape Sunkist” in another large mixed media work. Her image of conquering the land and the people on it for some higher sense of good changes in her hands. The vibrancy of her color choices, plus the addition of wrapping containers to underline the littering of the land, rather than the glorifying of it, stands out.

In the smaller back room Bernadette Houk has several three-dimensional sculptural pieces and some two-dimensional paintings that she says in a posted piece of paper at the door represent her working out some pretty traumatic moments that she has gone through.

That’s not a brand-new idea, for some artist friends have taken on the loss of someone close to them and aesthetically chiseled away at the deep emotional pain through their art.

Three works get at the range of emotional fervor that Houk seems to want to display. One, a sculptural piece called “Ready for the Big Time” shows a clearly distraught-looking, pigtailed young woman with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and another stuffed pack of Marlboros at her side. There is a certain irony to the outward bravado.

In a large red painting called “I am Rage, I am the Fire” we get the idea of fury and over-the-top anger that the artist was trying to convey in this work. It is very dramatically conceived and done.

Bernadette Houk, “I am the Rage, I am the Fire.” Photo by Roger Durbin

Another work is a sculptural piece called “Why Does No One Come?” The expression on the woman’s face shows the sadness of the idea behind the title.

Bernadette Houk, “Why Does No One Come?” Photo by Roger Durbin

The works by Maggie Duff in her “Parade Bomb” series and Bernadette Houk’s trauma series will be on display 12-9 p.m. Thursday and 12-5 p.m. Friday-Saturday through June 14 in the Box gallery in Summit Artspace, 140 E. Market St., Akron; 330-376-8480; www.akronareaarts.org. Admission is free.