On a big open wall in a former Catholic school in Braddock hangs the largest painting artist John Lee has ever completed. Across its twelve foot span, an array of dancing figures—heads from all over the animal kingdom; bodies straight off American Bandstand—dance, twist, and turn in wild abandon. The painting still doesn’t have a title, but when it does it’ll have something to do with dead oceans and/or Bob Dylan.

“I just really like making art,” Lee says in an understatement we’ll not dispute, “If I really love something, I want to do it some more—I don’t feel in control of the process.”

When last we left The Cardboard Caravaggio™, he was long on paintings and short on gallerists willing to host them. The Honor System Art Gallery he set up on a condemned storefront is Garfield is long since gone—the building itself was razed not long after—paintings distributed throughout Hazelwood disappeared just as quickly.

This Saturday, though, Pittsburgh will have only its second chance to see John Lee’s work in a gallery setting. This time he’ll have a little more room to spread out than he did at The Silver Apple.

So much room, in fact, that the show is a double-bill with Columbus artist Rachel McFarlane David, an old friend and collaborator of Lee’s. David’s lovely detailed drawings and folk art-inspired wood-carvings will share wall space with Lee’s loose-limbed disco-dancing and yoga-flexing bird people and plaid-skinned omni-eyed “everyman.”

More Heat Than Light, the name for the combined show, came with a backstory way deeper than your author had anticipated. There’s a Shakespeare reference, something dealing with a hit YA author’s marketing theory, and the history of electrical illumination. That preamble lead to art’s natural frustration between balancing light (presumably, all the good parts) with heat (the effort it took to get there) … at least, I think that’s where we got to.

However we arrived, the combined show is a two-great-tastes affair for sure. The contrast between David’s precision and Lee’s let-it-all-hang-out maximalism won’t be lost on anyone. You’ll have to get in nose-to-the-glass close to see the detail in David’s penstrokes and pyrography (wood burning with a stylus); Lee’s figures will read from Kennywood.

“I thoroughly enjoy John’s work and mindset,” David says, “We think differently and we work differently, but there’s a commonality in the work.”

Both artists are frequent users of recycled and repurposed materials, for one, and they both love color. John Lee’s affection for cardboard is hard to miss, but David’s work on wood is much more stealthy. The source material comes from discarded cookware and furniture, wood scraps and curbside pickups from neighborhood walks. Some of the artworks’ former lives are obvious—there are a couple cutting boards that still look like cutting boards. Others require a peek at the back for a hint at the wood’s source.

More Heat Than Light happens this Saturday, May 11, 6-9pm, at Unsmoke Systems: 1137 Braddock Ave, Braddock, PA.