Pink and Pearl Gallery (711 8th Ave.)...

Pink and Pearl Gallery (711 8th Ave.) is like a private alternative space where photographer Richard Peterson installs exhibitions in his studio and turns over all proceeds from sales to the artists. You will see works of art there that you won’t see elsewhere.

With the motto, “in pursuit of the undefinable,” it represents a combined sophistication and naivete, even idealism, that is now possibly unique in San Diego.

Its present show includes “fossils” and “snow-shake-up-scenes” by Los Angeles artist Steve Thomsen, a founder of the Los Angeles art group World Imitation and a member of the band Monitor.

Thomsen’s older works, the shake-up-scenes, are wondrously perverse adaptations of a common plaything, the plastic bubbles enclosing tableaux and white material for creating miniature snowstorms.

Thomsen’s tableaux are not, however, quaint, but sinister. He favors infants playing with skulls and angels wearing bats’ wings. In one bubble, Godzilla chews on Santa Claus; in another, a ballerina dances en pointe on a human brain. A masterpiece of its type is a male torso with a flashing red heart.

Thomsen’s more recent works are fossils of the future--what artifacts of our time would look like to archeologists millennia from now. The artist did extensive research to achieve verisimilitude, the look of objects buried so long that they are inseparable from the earth encasing them. Some are the real thing; others are skillfully molded copies. The presentation of machinery parts, of a string of Christmas lights and of children’s toys in reliefs such as you might view in a museum of man is amusing and disorienting. Thomsen using sweet nostalgia for sober instruction creates contemporary memento mori.

The exhibition continues through Aug. 16.

The Tarbox Gallery (1201 Kettner Blvd.) is featuring the illusionistic paintings of Minnesota-based artist Edward Evans. Although his works have the appearance of photographs of yards of wrinkled fabric, they are carefully crafted of canvas and pigment.

Evans prepares his surfaces with as many as 30 layers of sanded rhoplex. Having made them as smooth as silk, he applies as many as 60 layers of thinned acrylic paints with an airbrush. Although he developed this technique to emulate the illusionism of the masters of earlier centuries, his contemporary use of color ambiguously repudiates illusionism while ostensibly completing it.

The paintings range from the monochromaticism of “Pandora’s Ember” and “Mesabi Gold” to the glorious rainbows of colors of “Magdalene” and “Dream Shuttle.”

Evans’ idea is simple and his paintings are decorative. Still, wonder-making and seductive, they give much pleasure.

The exhibition continues through Aug. 16.

The San Diego Art Institute in Balboa Park, in addition to its second annual Midsummer Award show, is also offering two solo exhibitions.

Elaine Bracken-Bisconti’s works, as a group entitled “Life in Runes,” are explorations of human links to the universe. The variety of styles among them evinces confusion rather than versatility.

Chris McFadden’s “Musings,” portrait monoprints and oil paintings, simply evince redundancy.

The exhibitions continue through July 29.

The Knowles Gallery in La Jolla (7420 Girard Ave.) is showing a group of paintings in gouache and sculptures in handmade paper by Thierry Charelain. The prominent local artist uses his masterful technical skills to create sharp-focused, imaginary, representational scenes of mystical experiences in a variety of cultures, including Egyptian, American Indian, Celtic and Tibetan.

Chatelain has said, “Painting is not only an aesthetic activity, it is a form of magic. The artist invites this mysterious element to flow through him, transcending surface technique and imagery, coming to life beyond his own imagination.”

The magic in Chatelain’s works, however, rarely goes beyond his technique--his consummate draftsmanship, color sense and the luminousness of his surfaces. And perhaps that is enough. An exception is “Return of the Gods,” in which the jaguar god returns the quetzal bird to the material world. There is mystery in it.

The sculptures are handsome high reliefs inspired by carvings in the Mayan city of Copan.

The exhibition continues through Aug. 6.