By Weston Art Gallery

"Through Time" by Deborah Morrissey-McGoff includes the props from Da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

The concept was too compelling to refuse. Proposals to 85 artists netted replies from 82, and of those 75 people completed works for the Weston Gallery's 10th anniversary exhibition at downtown Cincinnati's Aronoff Center. The result fills every nook and cranny of the gallery space with fireworks of response, as individual as each artist who made them.

Ideas into Objects: Reinterpreting the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci asks artists to spin off from one of the most fertile minds in history and produce an object originating from any of the myriad jottings Leonardo used as his own aides de memoire. Guest curator Kip Eagen brought the idea to Dennis Harrington, director of the Weston Gallery, who saw in it an inspired route to an anniversary exhibition. The gallery, founded 10 years ago as a window onto the area's visual arts, consistently provides interesting and arresting shows that fill a gap the artists, above all, knew was there. This anniversary exhibition is an eloquent demonstration of the vitality of the gallery and the local visual arts community. Invitations to participate went to those who have had one-person exhibitions or have been part of small group shows in the space.

A slam/bam entry hits the eye immediately in the street level gallery, where Emily Buddenbeck's "Things Are Looking Up" appropriates one of the room's own columns to translate the gracious gesture of Leonardo's infant Christ into something brash and familiar -- or perhaps not; it's your call. Thom Shaw takes off from an anatomical drawing of a heart to layered thoughts in a big, demanding painting, "That Crossroad Blues Thing: Eating the Heart Out of Isms and Schisms," and nearby TODT utilizes studies of a multi-barreled gun to reverse the idea of swords into plowshares with "Ballista," a neat little garden plow equipped with wicked arrows.

The downstairs installation is a marvel of space utilization, from Tony Luensman's quite beautiful "Floating Puddle #2," coexisting easily with stored paint rollers in a utility closet, to Mark Patsfall's "Dissecting da Vinci" and Keith Benjamin's "Location, Location, Location," which share space beneath the stairs without infringing on each other. Despite the crowd, each work seems to have enough space to breath, and the whole only replicates the rush of thoughts that fills every page of the source.

One drawing can have vastly different interpretations. Just outside Luensman's closet, Suzanne Fisher takes the same study of water movements to produce a mosaic wall fountain, "Pissing Urchin," and Kimberly Burleigh's two studies in turbulence, large, handsome, computer-generated ink jet prints, again look to that page.

Anatomical studies, particularly those of human or animal fetus in uterus, were a potent inspiration. Kate Kern's "Thy Kingdom Come" enlarges studies of the blood supply of a fetal calf onto two large joined sheets, the pulsing swirls brushed in ink over graphite and colored pencil to fine effect. Thomas R. Phelps goes all Christmas-y over a human fetus in "Universal Procreation," with a floor to ceiling installation in red, green and the blue of Mary's robe plus some tinsel. William Schickel moves the fetus right onto the cross in a somber painting primarily of two flat grays and a blued red with the partitioned fetus showing a fleshly pink in only two small sections.

Playfulness has its place, too. See James Duesing's "Man Date," a flip book in which a male nude can be seen in action fore and aft, depending on which side you flip. Stephanie Cooper puts studies of a leg immediately to work with a wheel-operated machine for kicking.

Some of Leonardo's own machine studies are interpreted, elegantly by Vratislav Novak, using stainless steel wire of hair's breadth width, and amusingly by Alan Rath, who constructs a machine to make a pink plume wave from a drawing of cog wheels.

Some pieces incorporate technology unknown in the 16th century and not foreseen by even Leonardo's active mind. Imagination leaps at the thought of Leonardo at the computer or with a video camera -- what might he have done! -- and the thought takes form in Claudia Esslinger's "Absent/Present," extrapolating a drapery study into a mesmerizing video in which almost invisible dancers inhabit draperies moving to ecclesiastical music. See Mark Patsfall, beneath the stair, for thoughts on where a computer might have taken Leonardo.

Classicism endures, however, even in works indisputably of our time but infused with knowledge of the past. See the beautiful geometric projections in pale colors in Shawna Guip's "Calculation for Self-Annihilation" and Deborah Morrissey-McGoff's "Through Time," serendipitously hung next to each other. In the latter people (models?) have left "The Last Supper," but props remain -- fruit, bread, plates ­-- and a paint pallet, pallet knife and pot holding brushes are seen. Diana Duncan Holmes and Timothy Riordan's "Brood X," a wonderful meditation on (yes!) cicadas, puts to use various contemporary tools but maintains a classical outlook.

From Leonardo's "Allegory of Man's Labours," Nancy Fletcher Cassell was inspired to make my pick from the whole show: "Between Heaven and Earth," a set of three prints and a stoneware vase that are simultaneously delicate and undeniably strong.

Setting a tone for the exhibition is Debbie Brod's "Looking for Leonardo," with a chair and desk, the latter inundated by a welter of drawings, writings and potted plants, a sweater hanging on a hook beside. The great man has just stepped away. But as the rest of the show tells us, he's never gone very far. Grade: A