Life as a Waking Dream

The first work you see in Steve Galloway’s exhibition is an action-packed picture of four crocodiles moving through a swamp’s choppy waters. Three of the beasts throw their awesome mouths open and encircle the fourth, who, having lashed homemade stilts to his stubby legs, strolls along as if he’s above it all, a smirk of superiority giving his reptilian features a familiar human expression. Titled “Perfect Wisdom,” this large pastel boldly asserts that wisdom and folly go hand-in-glove, and that both involve big risks that will probably turn the crowd against you.

Then things get strange.

In 60 fantastically detailed and oddly realistic drawings and paintings on paper and canvas, monkeys clamber over ruins, goats stand atop one another’s backs to get a better view and skeletons dance as if there’s no tomorrow. Thick clouds fill the sky with darkness and all sorts of cobbled monuments and jerry-built shelters spring up in the middle of nowhere, as if an apocalyptic disaster has left the Earth inhabited only by a handful of hermits.

People rarely appear in Galloway’s images, although isolated limbs and a head or two occasionally protrude from the openings of elaborate Mardi Gras costumes. Sprouting from the necks of dozens of business suits are fish heads, bird nests, rusty pipes, haystacks and a leaning tower of cheddar wedges, like those worn by Packer fans.

Framed paintings hang from the necks of long-billed birds, recalling old-fashioned sandwich boards. Other pictures have been divided into as many as 50 sections, each compartment depicting a thumbnail study of a remarkable artifact, architectural structure, weather phenomenon or not-to-be-missed landscape. These highlights resemble homemade postcards, suggesting that viewers have stumbled upon an adventurer’s travelogue, a firsthand record of a trip to a mysterious land filled with absurdity and intrigue.

If there is madness in Galloway’s outlandish imagery, there’s also a method to it. Confusion, his art demonstrates, provides fertile ground out of which ideas naturally sprout, take root and flourish.

Organized by guest curator Josine Ianco-Starrels for the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, “Blue Plow: Steve Galloway, Survey 1979-2000” amplifies the illogic at work in each of its pieces by following a chronologically disordered installation plan. To visit the multilayered show is to realize, pretty quickly, that there is no proper order in which Galloway’s images must be seen for them to make sense. In fact, jumping back and forth among works made over the last 20 years highlights the out-of-sync, out-of-whack quality that is essential to the artist’s conviction that insights do not march down well-traveled paths but arrive, unexpected, from far out in left field.

Dreams provide the most useful model for what transpires in Galloway’s art, and many of his images depict fragmented dramas that take place at night. In “Black Wind,” a nude man turns his back to viewers and strides off into the dusk, strewing handfuls of darkness from a bucket as if he were Johnny Appleseed’s doppelganger. In “Satellite Watch,” a similar figure lies on his back in a river valley, whiling away the day as he awaits the night’s adventures.

The installation plays upon the relationship between day and night by dedicating one gallery to black-and-white pastel and charcoal drawings and another to brightly colored gouaches and oils. To step from one room to the next is to move from the romance of silvery moonlight to the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs.

Artificially lit interiors dominate the third and final gallery, in which the chaos of everyday experience is temporarily shoehorned into rudimentary categories. A trompe l’oeil painting of an idealized picture gallery, Galloway’s “Museum of Agriculture + Biology” pays perverse homage to systems of classification by insisting that life shares more with Pandora’s box than with tidy file cabinets. Likewise, “Drowsy Din Down at Tin Town” updates Charles Willson Peale’s famous painting from 1822, in which the artist throws back a curtain to reveal the myriad wonders he has carefully packed into a storeroom.

One of the best things about Galloway’s freewheeling works is that they bring the illogic of dreams to the light of day without destroying their magic. Deeply skeptical of knowledge that is detached from experience, his accessible pictures fuse loopy fantasy and plodding realism to outline a worldview in which folly and wisdom constantly cross paths.

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* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 792-5101, through June 11. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Free.