U-M School of Art and Design Art professor Jim Cogswell’s “Meanwhile” at Washtenaw Community College’s GalleryOne is far more than its seemingly casual title would suggest.

In fact, the relaxed attitude of the title indicates that — like all Cogswell’s art — there’s a lot more to “Meanwhile” than merely waiting a bit: The Gallery One exhibit actually celebrates two Cogswell events taking place at WCC in the near future.

Cogswell’s “Meanwhile O Reader” (an oil-on-canvas frieze; abstractly composed of the letters in its title) was installed as a permanent feature last August in the Richard W. Bailey Library (in WCC’s Gunder Myran Building). The mural was commissioned by the WCC Library Art Selection Committee after a nationwide proposal.

WCC’s art gallery, in conjunction with the Bailey Library, will host a reception and lecture for Cogswell on Nov. 11 with remarks from 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Bailey Library — to be followed with a lecture from 6-7 p.m. in LA 175 and then a reception from 7-8 p.m. in Gallery One.

The visual elements of the 36-foot-long by five-foot-high frieze are based on images derived from the letters “M-E-A-N-W-H-I-L-E- -O- -R-E-A-D-E-R” in both the upper and the lower horizontal bands. The images are a continuation of Cogswell’s 2008 laminated paperwork “O Reader” (inspired by a passage from Italo Calvino’s 1979 “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” novel) which was conceived for the Morlan Gallery at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky; itself adapted from a prior hand-cut adhesive shelf paper mural “O Reader,” previously installed at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Depree Art Gallery at Hope College in Holland.

This astounding (as well as audacious) conceptual complexity is in large part the wonder of Cogswell’s art. For these works — like his magnificent 2007 shelf paper “Nothing to Say,” installed at the U-M Institute for the Humanities — derive from his career long fascination with the visual articulation of words, the alphabet — and, ultimately, language itself.

Indeed, “Meanwhile” finds Cogswell simultaneously expanding his visual iconography in “Meanwhile O Reader” by incorporating celestial imagery and Andy Warhol. The upshot is an exhibit more closely akin in spirit to Houston’s famed Rothko Chapel with Cogswell’s surround, serially-abstracted hand-cut paper installations and mixed-media tableau placed strategically around the gallery like iconographic panels rather than as a conventionally conceived and executed art exhibit.

The surfaces for “Silence” and “There” feature what Cogswell dubs his “anthropomorphic alphabet” with their bright, multicolored decorative motifs swirling about on paper constructions ranging 8 by 18 feet.

Cogswell explains their “ovoid shape” are “celestial globes” inspired by Giovanni Maria Cassini’s 1792 “Celestial Globe Gores.” But no matter how accounted for, these handsomely complex “letters” are intellectualized calligraphic renderings by other cosmic means.

Equally remarkable, Cogswell’s mixed-media installation, “Here I Am,” consists of 143 rusted and/or acrylic painted paint cans (stacked in 13 rows of 11 cans each) that have been set on a wood platform and braced by a wall of painted paper plates. Cogswell says this work has been “inspired by U-M Astronomer Dr. Fabian Heitsch’s computer model simulating the birth of stars from turbulent molecular clouds in interstellar space.” But the result is all his own.

Cogswell then adds, “I have borrowed (Heitsch’s) explosive shapes, which represent the slow eddy, swirl, and collision over time beyond human imagination of the most basic star building molecules, and attached them to stacks of empty paint cans using machine cut vinyl.” The installation's vigorous gestural workings and reworkings leap at the viewer.

Given his generously leaning on the alphabet and other sources in the history of ideas for his inspiration, Cogswell so thoroughly reshapes the atmosphere around him, there’s no question that his art eventually gets to where it’s going — even if he only gets it there meanwhile.

“Jim Cogswell: Meanwhile” continues through Dec. 11 at Washtenaw Community College’s Gallery One, Student Center Building Room 108, 4800 E. Huron River Dr. Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday-Tuesday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Wednesday-Thursday; and 10 a.m.-noon, Friday. For information, call 734-477-8512.

John Carlos Cantú is a free-lance writer who reviews art for AnnArbor.com.