From the Eyes of Artists : ‘Searching for Eden’ exhibit at Mythos shows works that other galleries refuse to display.

Glen Doll feels that art has taken a very cynical turn in the last five to 10 years. Not fond of that trend, he decided to do something to help reverse it.

For several years, Doll, a painter and photographer, has been producing videos and slide presentations for corporations--”so I’d have a little walking-around money,” he said in his Burbank studio. Recently, he converted the building into an art gallery called Mythos and opened the gallery with the exhibit “Searching for Eden.”

“I’d go into artists’ studios and see incredibly exciting work that galleries wouldn’t show,” he said. He wanted to open a gallery “that started from the artist’s standpoint.”

Lamenting the aloofness with which some Westside gallery owners and employees treat people who venture into their galleries, he said he believes the community around him “would like art if it were presented in a halfway friendly manner. The public is pretty thoroughly estranged from art. I’ll do whatever I can to make the space accessible, to slightly reinvent what a gallery is about. It’s the only one in Burbank, so we can do things a little differently.”

“Part of it is an educational experience too,” said artist Lucinda Luvaas, who curated the gallery’s inaugural exhibit with Doll. “There’s something intimate and warm about this space. Glen loves art, cares about these things, is nurturing to other artists--he is an artist. Artists want to take back something they’ve lost from the (gallery/museum) power groups that have sapped their energy.”

Doll and Luvaas selected 40 works by 25 artists for the “Searching for Eden” show. “I wanted a theme that I thought might attract artists with whom I have something in common,” Doll said. “I think we’re awfully far outside the garden. The word that started grabbing my fancy is disintegration. It applies to everything I run into. The spiritual side is poorly integrated into our lives. A search is in order.

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“These are hard times in which to believe in anything idyllic, but that may be all the more reason to search for it. All of a sudden, I’ve started painting with tropical colors. I’ve started to become more hopeful.”

In her work, Luvaas also presents an optimistic viewpoint, depicting men and women, children, animals and birds enjoying their time on Earth and with each other. Yet many of the works in this show demonstrate that the search for Eden is fraught with dark, debilitating passageways.

There is no paradise in Bianca Kovar’s oil-on-canvas “The Oil Refinery-Ring Around a Toxin.” Before a burning landscape, three headless men stand holding poles in the air, white gloves on their tips. As Kovar sees it, Eden is certainly not here on Earth.

Merry Moor Winnet’s black-and-white photograph “Shangri-La” conveys a more hopeful perspective. A lush, unusual tree stands at the center of this softly focused picture, beckoning to us. Above the tree, a somewhat ominous bird-like creature hurtles toward it, perhaps suggesting this paradise holds some foreboding characters and places.

Eugene Yelchin has chosen some novel means of transportation for his vibrant pictorial journeymen. One picture is called “Goat Rider,” and the other, “Chicken Rider.” In both, a Don Quixote-like adventurer is riding tall in the saddle, so to speak, as if in a parade.

In the painting “Fantasies,” Linda Wood Feldman has captured the warmth and sensuality of Eden for lovers who are embraced by a colorful, expressionistic landscape. All the Angst that Eden may entail is absent in Allison Kendis’ “Sublime.” Her amused feminine figure with bright red lips sits on the ground with a red snake dangling about a leg.

Doll said that when he goes looking at art, he wants to be “struck by something. That’s magic, and wonderful.” At his gallery, he hopes to “strike people at a gut level.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Searching for Eden.”

Location: Mythos Gallery, 1009 W. Olive Ave., Burbank.

Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and by appointment. Ends June 11.

Call: (818) 843-3686.