DOWNTOWN

Constance Mallinson makes splashy Hawaiian-print-shirt paintings that collage snatches of idealized landscape that have been cut up into easily digestible aesthetic snacks.

A former art critic and minimalist painter, Mallinson ushers us into a picture-perfect post-card world where nature has been converted into a form of fast food, and has all the resonance of a cheap souvenir pillow one might purchase at the Grand Canyon. The underlying message is that our ability to see has been impaired by an avalanche of pictorial cliches, and Mallinson hammers the point home by superimposing human perceptual apparatus--eyes, nose, mouth--over her kitsch patchwork quilts.

Trashy and bright as a B-52s’ album, the work is rooted in the notion that the way we imagine that the physical world looks has been inaccurately shaped by elementary-school textbooks, Madison Avenue, National Geographic magazine and Jacques Cousteau. These glossy slabs of misinformation have left us with memory banks like cluttered garages filled with useless debris. Each of her paintings address a specific manifestation of this syndrome: monuments and wonders of the world in “Epitaph,”; the tropical, Club Med fantasy in “Paradise,”; various permutations of purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain in “Mask.”

Mallinson also explores the idea of artist as mediator between man and nature, and the implications of the artists’ signature. In “The Artist Sees,” two huge eyes on a black field radiate glorious, heavenly light. “Narcissus II” depicts a silhouetted figure gazing out to sea at dusk; marching across the horizon line are the words “Constance Mallinson.” If the point here is that man tends to find his own reflection in all that he sees, it’s difficult to disagree. (Ovsey Gallery, 705 E. 3rd St., to Nov. 30).