There is an old joke about the platypus having been designed by committee; thus the ridiculous combination of mismatched body parts. The Contradictions go beyond the animal's appearance to its function, as indicated in the title of this group exhibition: It's a Mammal But it Lays Eggs. Group shows in general tend to share that "Chex Mix" quality with the playtpus. After all, they too have been designed by committee.

This group exhibition hangs together better than many, despite the very different styles of the seven artists. Perhaps because the artists are roughly at the same level of expertise. All of them work primarily with some form of two-dimensional mixed media, and all have at least one of their degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University. They are: Andras J. Bality, Nathan Buttleman, Gregg Carbo, Stephen Clark, Danny Drotos, Bill Fisher, and Louis Poole.

I have a hunch that the platypus mascot also represents each individual art work: each single piece manifests seemingly contradictory elements. Take Stephan Clark's mixed media canvas, in which series of stiffly rendered objects-loaves of bread, marching soldiers-are juxtaposed against scribble bursts and smears of paint. These blobs and scrawls seem to say: sometimes we just contain ourselves. Chaos bubbles over.

And then there are Louis Poole's oil and graphite drawings of houses, in which the deft rendering of architectural structure is imbued with painterly swaths of color. The deliberately added-on bright pastels remind me of old hand-tinted photographs . Diebenkorn comes to mind as well, in the use of vivid color tamed into geometric figure structure.

Bill Fisher's mixed media pieces on wood look like something out of the last Corcoran Biennial, Painting Outside Painting: works concerned with the formal aspects of painting, but not necessarily paint itself. Fisher's monochromatic facades of oil, wax, and plaster on wood, play with positive and negative space. Openings between slates of wood (dark) are contrasted with plastered gaps between slats (white).Fisher's works, especially his largest untitled piece (#11) have a wonderfully waxy, buffed surface that beckons to be touched.

Andras Bality's oil paintings are figurative and yet, on another level, abstract. All involve water, the rhythm of which provides the abstract element. Often there is a disturbing image downplayed among images of banal, peaceful pastimes.In Stuart, Where's Stuart? there is a couple chatting and children playing in the shallow water of the foreground, while in the background a man has fallen overboard and is offered a life preserver. In Hospital Reflection During Flood, a depiction of two boys calmly leading horses above contrasts with the scene in the reflection below, where medical personel carry people on gurneys. Only one of Bality's paintings in this show does not include a dog-the dog in the water seems to symbolize rescue, or the possibility thereof.

Danny Drotos' shaped plywood mixed media works are platypus like in their physical combination of materials as well as the stream-of-consciousness memories/fantasies that are their subject. His two cut-out plywood pieces, Inside, and Blow Out, contain Popish funky car-imagery, with hints of human forms, and phrases of text scratched in: "do you know where the danger zone is", and "I remember my first kiss/I was frantic and scrambled between the front and back seats like a gerbil". These two appealing pieces, refreshingly, do not ask to be taken too seriously. Drotos' drawings are spontaneously witty, especially Better than Before, Smarter, in which a robot/business man (he has buttons and gadgets on him but appears to be wearing a suit), whirs away on his many legs like an overwound toy.

Nathan Buttleman's acrylic paintings are all similar. They even have the same titles:Proxy.1, Proxy.2 , Proxy.3 , and Triproxy Prime. Each depicts a clearly visible power tie, collar, and suit lapel combination. Beyond the suit, a human outline disappears into a white noise background of parallel horizontal lines. The group of canvases are as interchangeable as a group of uniform-clad men glimpsed during the rush hour commute. The implications of anonymity in the white collar techno-field are all too obvious.

Gregg Carbo is represented by one space-consuming work, Nought Point, a long horizontal (45" by 245") series of white or black, created through a combination of processes. Some panels have been folded, wetted, and swept with a broom to leave random marks. Together the pieces stream along like scenes reduced into a photographic negative or movie reel. There is a mathematical order behind this piece, according to Curator Sarah Tanguy's text, but it is not apparent to the viewer.

Despite the great differences in style, there are comparisons to be drawn in this show as well as contrasts. Poole and Fisher both take some inspiration, it seems, from weathered architectural facades, bringing to mind tensions between the urge to build and the inevitability of decay. Clark, Carbo, and Bality all play with contrasts between random and ordered form and imagery, albeit with quite different methods. Like the platypus itself, a strange mix of ingredients adds up to something which works swimmingly.

There are twenty-four well chosen art works in It's a Mammal, But it Lays Eggs, just enough to represent each artist's body of work, without rambling. (The silver lining of a small gallery space: it forces artists and curators to pick the cream of their crop.) As a group, the work of these seven artists demonstrates that drawing and painting are far from extinct as vital art forms.