Hazy Images, Clear Meaning

The vague-eyed women who people Judy Thompson’s exhibition “Accepted Gifts” at the Childress Gallery in Ojai are not so much about flesh and blood as they are symbolic vessels, adrift in metaphor-laden scenery. In this evocative, coherently realized series of paintings by the Ojai-based artist, her subjects seem to languish amid objects and creatures worth their weight in potential meaning.

Recurring everyday items, such as purses and unopened gifts, lurk sententiously in the periphery, as containers of unstated worth and possibly class status. Less realistically, monkeys hide in the background like a simian Greek chorus, triggering a sense of dream logic.

An implicit feminist stance is taken, if subtly: The “gifts” of these intentionally sketchy characters are usually left unfulfilled or half-baked. In one image, a date is little more than a kempt suit, out of which a bouquet of lilies springs, Magritte-like.

In another, a woman slinks into the plush folds of a comfy chair, awash in anxiety or depression, but still clutching a handbag for dear life. Barely visible behind a vase is one of Thompson’s cryptic apes, as if representing the encroachment of natural, extra-domestic energy.

Thompson’s imagery seems strangely familiar and modestly strange. More important than any social or emotional message to be gleaned here, her paintings charge the imagination and cloud the mind, in a rewarding way.

* Judy Thompson, “Accepted Gifts,” through April 19 at the G. Childress Gallery, 319 E. Roblar in Ojai; 640-1387.