Santa Monica

In the mid ‘80s Nancy Reese received attention for her strange brand of realism and her collaborations with art star Edward Ruscha. Her quirky content and masterful execution haven’t ebbed; Reese continues to evolve from an interesting newcomer to a confident artist with a personal voice.

Reese’s large-scale paintings romp over subjects from the primeval to the futuristic. Levels of reality and consciousness--in art and life--are made to collide so that scenes feel like an amalgam between Max Ernst and Kurt Vonnegut.

In one sumptuous work handled like a rich Renaissance icon, two large, frontal nudes--male and female--stand in an ambiguous dark space. The female’s head is replaced by a simplified native mask, the male’s by the deftly painted head of a deer. There’s a weird urgency and eroticism to Reese’s imagery. In one work, odd, incandescent sci-fi machinery takes the foreground while smoldering skies burn with a Ruscha-esque glow. The scene looks like a barren 21st-Century landscape in which humans have long become extinct and nasty nuclear reactors chug away with dogmatic efficiency. Science fiction takes on the immediacy of reality and reality becomes the slick surface of a post card. (Krygier/Landau Gallery, 2114 Broadway, to Feb. 10.)