At This Table, Creativity Is as Basic an Instinct as Eating

Art lovers are known to go to irrational extremes to feed their desires. But when push comes to shove, few truly believe that art ranks right up there with food and sex as an innate drive. Nancy Jackson does not share such fair-weather convictions. At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, the 45-year-old artist’s solo debut boldly proclaims that enjoying art’s pleasures is intrinsically no different from eating or procreating. All three are essential components of our animal selves, basic activities that form the core of who we are as people.

Her exhibition, which fills three galleries with paintings, sculptures and drawings completed during the last six years, opens with a small gouache on paper. The untitled work depicts a cave woman, who has transformed the entrance of her humble abode into a lavish setup that rivals a department store’s holiday window display. A two-tiered table, covered with a form-fitting white tablecloth, curves around the cave’s opening like a grand buffet. Laid out atop it are decorative delectables that spring from Jackson’s fertile imagination: vases and vessels filled with fantastic plants and foodstuffs. Some form miniature landscapes in which elfin creatures cavort.

The links among art, food and basic life forms are driven home by “Large Figment,” a nearly 4-by-5-foot painting that features a single place setting at a round table filled with luscious treats and whimsical centerpieces. Hovering in the blackest of voids, the extravaganza is kept aloft by a school of jellyfish, whose sinuous tendrils protrude from beneath the tablecloth. On top, Jackson has laid out a cornucopia of fruit, a gigantic artichoke, an icing-coated cake, a fish from whose mouth spills an avalanche of orange berries and a mysterious dish that resembles a cross between an oyster and twice-baked potato, adorned with a bumblebee.

If you still doubt that nature and culture are two sides of the same coin, another untitled painting provides evidence of the flip side. Perched in a tree before an abstract background, a monkey mimics Clark Kent, when the mild-mannered journalist pulls open his shirt to reveal his Superman outfit. When Jackson’s amiable primate pulls open his furry chest, he beats Superman at his own game, revealing a cityscape crowded with skyscrapers. The urban jungle forms his heart and soul.

Architecture is an important component of Jackson’s ambitious refashioning of conventional ideas about art’s primacy. A trio of three-dimensional works, titled “Fire Blossom of the Present Moment,” “Multi-Chambered Rotating Cloud House” and “Courtyard with Canopy,” marries the loveliness of a little girl’s dream dollhouse to the refinement of a fabulous interior decorator and the sophistication of a serious thinker. Each of these delicately wrought masterpieces contains so many worlds within worlds that their wonders never cease.

So complete is Jackson’s re-creation of the world that she includes a pair of nearly life-size ceramic figures in her exhibition. Dressed like museum guards, each draws back his jacket and rests his left hand on a pistol holstered on his hip, like a gunfighter from the Wild West. Combining the democratic impulse of Jim Shaw’s mix-and-match oeuvre with the decorative femininity of Florine Stettheimer’s frilly paintings, Jackson’s potent art brings dreams to life.

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Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Strength in Subtlety: The paintings, drawings and watercolors in Delia Brown’s L.A. solo debut at Margo Leavin Gallery transform fantasy into reality by turning dreams about the future into mementos of a past that isn’t what it used to be.

To work this curious magic, the young artist hired an assistant to photograph her and her dealer as they posed in Leavin’s home on six days since last December--chopping vegetables, lounging poolside, watching the morning news, talking on the phone, applying nail polish, and chatting over coffee and cigarettes. Brown then took the pictures to her studio, where they became the basis for paintings and drawings.

Neither polished nor formulaic, her 35 works intensify the intimacy of the photographs. They combine the earnestness of an overachiever with the casual sensuality of youth--and the street smarts of someone who knows a good thing when she sees it. A sense of awkward vulnerability--of pushing just beyond the boundaries of one’s comfort level--characterizes Brown’s brushwork. It also suffuses the narratives suggested by her images.

Her drawings have the presence of studies in which details of lighting, scale and mood are worked out. The swiftly sketched portraits, which often include Leavin’s dachshunds Pablo and Chiquita, convey ease and familiarity. Others feel tentative and uncertain. One, which shows Brown taking a shower as she chats with Leavin, makes palpable the nervous discomfort of the staged setup.

The artist is at her best with water-based media. Her light touch is well suited to the fluidity of watercolors, an unforgiving medium that demands you get it right the first time or forget it. There’s also a domestic pulse to her translucent washes of color, whose ordinariness matches the pleasures depicted: sunbathing, gardening and relaxing with an afternoon cocktail.

Brown’s paintings on panel add heft to such respites from the daily grind. One depicts a nighttime conversation in a dimly lighted room, its intrigue amplified by understatement. In contrast, three pictures of the pair arguing theatrically have the overblown presence of caricatures. Subtlety is Brown’s strength.

The seven oils on canvas display precocious aplomb in capturing the personalities of the sitters. But they’re still a little stiff, neither as loose or lyrical as her smaller works.

The longer you look at the show as a whole, the more convinced you are that Brown is on intimate terms with her dealer. And if her works continues to be as well received as they have been, what was a fantasy less than a year ago will become a part of history. Art changes the world--only not how you expect it to.

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Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The Mundane and the Miraculous: Imagine a good old-fashioned movie distilled into a single image, and you’ll have an idea of the psychological resonance that Patty Wickman compresses into each of her three wall-size paintings at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art. All of the ordinary people in her workmanlike pictures appear to have rich interior lives, which are often out of sync with their surroundings.

The first depicts a young girl kneeling in front of a bunk bed as she makes a shadow puppet of a bird on her chest. The small room is a mess, with clothes spilling from dresser drawers and miscellaneous objects scattered about, including a lock, a cordless phone and an empty bird cage. The naked bulb of a lamp, set on the floor in the foreground, bathes the otherwise claustrophobic scene in bright light. This softens the girl’s somber expression, washing away the shadow of melancholy. A mixture of resignation and serenity belies her youthful demeanor.

Eight tinted drawings on toned sheets of paper present variations on this theme. Some include three views of the girl, along with one or three lamps. All but one of these studies include a bird flying overhead. It’s significant that Wickman has eliminated the bird from the version she painted. Its absence, evoked by the silhouette on the girl’s chest, increases the mystery, suggesting a private ritual.

In the second painting, a younger girl stands in a rowboat, gazing at three seated passengers whose backs are turned to viewers. All are oblivious to a white-capped wave that towers over their vulnerable vessel. It’s impossible to know whether absolute trust or utter cluelessness protects them.

The third, which is Wickman’s strangest and strongest work, presents a shirtless old man who’s half-covered with mud from the fertile soil he’s spreading in the middle of a sun-baked backyard. Staring wide-eyed beyond the frame, he bends his knees and thrusts his hands forward, as if to shield himself from some menace. At the same time, he may only be trying to get the crick out of his lower back. In either case, an eerie stillness suffuses the enigmatic picture.

Based on three of the four elements--air, water and earth--Wickman’s paintings inhabit a world that is both mundane and miraculous. Here, humdrum events and eye-opening epiphanies occur alongside one another, giving physical form to those moments when nothing much happens yet everything feels different.

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Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Dec. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fanciful Textures: Sherin Guirguis makes futuristic Rorschach blots. Each of the two-tone paintings on oddly shaped panels in her solo debut at Miller-Durazo Gallery is an abstraction whose symmetry is askew. Like blobs that can’t be bothered with the orderliness of bilateral balance, they evoke the freewheeling atmosphere of carnival-esque parties.

High-keyed colors, such as lipstick pink, fluorescent teal and neon green, fuel the decorative impulse on which Guirguis builds. Sensuous textures and shiny finishes recall Naugahyde and Pleather, synthetic substitutes for organic fabrics that are cheaper and easier to clean. A light sprinkling of glitter shimmers in “Paper Wings All Over Again,” whose dimpled surface resembles the cottage cheese ceilings of motel rooms.

Mid-century design is behind the young artist’s work. To make a composition, she pages through magazines and catalogs, picking out images of Modernist furniture as if she were shopping. Feeding their silhouettes into a computer, she twists and turns them in space, overlapping dozens to form clusters whose indescribable shapes swallow up details yet take on a life of their own.

Spindly little legs protrude from the bottoms of most, suggesting that cartoon caterpillars and centipedes are close relatives. “Sprung” looks like a cross between a lunar module and a bank of billowy clouds, highlighted by a tan crescent moon. “Green Pastures and Love Stories” appears to be a genetically altered lobster, its form and finish recalling the sleek muscularity of an Italian race car. Like balloons, all five seem to levitate. The best ones feel as if they’re about to burst.

Two suites of silk screens and a group of four drawings rouund out the show. They function as studies or two-dimensional prototypes for even more fanciful panels. Although it’s true that Guirguis’ shaped paintings just want to have fun, they raise this desire to an art, satisfying it as they sweep up viewers in the merrymaking.

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Miller-Durazo Gallery, 8720 W. Pico Blvd., (310) 652-0057, through Dec. 8. Closed Sunday-Tuesday.