Fair warning: this one is going to haunt you. 
    “Animalia as Metaphor”, the Jim Jones sculpture exhibit at the Averitt Center through March 2, just won’t let go of the imagination — or maybe it’s the conscience. 
    Let me explain. These astonishing mixed-media sculptures, these near life-size creatures are, quite literally, half-human, half animal — and you’re left to wonder which side is winning. 
    Take “Pig Head”, for example. The mottled gray male figure sprawled across a wooden diner chair gazes into the distance through the eye-holes of a pig mask.  At least that’s the image on first glance, and the figure’s relaxed posture makes you smile. Then you look again, and you see that the hand in the man’s lap is grasping a mask of a human face. Which nature is he trying on?  Which mask will he abandon and what will be hiding behind the one he keeps? Not so funny after all. This one will keep you pondering for a long time.
    Here’s another. “Cicada Man” crawls up the wall of the Main Gallery on all fours, his body shining red and brown like the chitin of his namesake insect’s body. His back is splayed open and peeled back, revealing an empty void, like a shed cicada skin. The first impression is of the marvel of new life set free, then of the hollowness of life gone. Are we to think about the “before” or the “after?” 
    You see? It won’t let you go.
    Jones’ shapes his ambiguity from mottled brown pulp and gray plaster. The pieces are lifelike in form, but with life’s colors drained out, have a dreamlike quality. In several, the wires of the underlying armature are visible.  Is the missing flesh yet to form or decaying away?
    The artist, on hand for the exhibit opening, smilingly refused to interpret.  Jones simply offers that he grew up farming and hunting, which included cleaning animals for the table.  He used the phrase “eviscerating them” and then added, “You can eviscerate anything.”  He dodged the follow-up question just as artfully.  Asked if he considers himself an optimist or a pessimist, Jones’ sly response was, “Both.”
    So it’s back to the exhibit once more in search of certainty, but it’s nowhere to be found. Standing before “Bad Bunny” you’re instantly drawn to the Mickey Mouse ears perched on the head of a man standing tall and easy, with an almost childlike pride. Scan down the figure and you’re oh-so-slightly horrified to find a curved blade gripped in one hand and a rabbit’s head dangling by its ears in the other. 
    Both optimist and pessimist? Our nature or our nurture? Sad or laughable?  What we are or what we could be? In the hour I spent at the exhibit, I overhead several people comment that it ranked as their favorite among the Averitt’s many.  While I’m certain there are dozens of shows in the running for that honor, I understand that appeal.  “Animalia as Metaphor” is enormously engaging in the moment, and its questioning conundrums won’t soon fade away.
    Don’t say I didn’t warn you.