It’s nice to walk into O’Kane Gallery and see artistic skill front and center. Talent, the kind that needs no lengthy text panel or high-brow theory to explain the work’s presence in the gallery, is on display in RAW, which runs through September 25. Better yet: all the exhibiting artists -- Doug Green, Mark Greenwalt, and Lisa Qualls -- are locals.

Mark Greenwalt brings virtuosic drawing chops to his dark and dizzying works. A mix of faces and perspectives give the appearance of a sketchbook page approached repeatedly. The surreal compositions blend the parts into an often grotesque whole. In lesser hands, it would be easy to try to make people squirm with lazy art tricks and gratuitously “edgy” subject matter; it’s the craft in his works that elevates his pieces.

Lisa Qualls, who also curated the show, provides the quietest pieces. Each piece has a solitary, costumed person on white backgound in various states of undress, in masks or roughly crafted outfits. If photographer Richard Avedon had painted his subjects, they might have looked a little like this.

History gets a hallucinogenic workout with Doug Cason's Impressionistic brush strokes that swirl and whirl battle fields and soldiers on three enlarged educational Civil War flash cards. His altered books add compact doses of color to the warmly monochromatic show.

Several lines of continuity keep the exhibition looking unified. Body as main subject matter, and subjecting figures to surreal settings and alterations. Or, in the case of Cason’s “reduced” tin-types, removing the people altogether. Repurposed vintage tin-types had much of their photographed images scraped from the surface, leaving only a few pictorial elements to give proof that someone at some time long ago sat in front of a camera. And you will never know what the finished image looked like.

RAW is on display until September 25. Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. O'Kane Gallery (University of Houston downtown). Free.