By Sharon Parker
Jennifer Davis and Daniel Buettner paint moderately surreal stories from their adolescence in a new exhibition called Orbital Me: Hello From My Place in the Universe (or, Welcome to my Universe) at Rosalux Gallery, in the Open Book Center. The show’s opening is this Saturday, January 7, 7-11 p.m., but the works went on display Wednesday.

On a recent afternoon I was the only visitor in the gallery, and it was pleasant to ponder these pictures and the stories behind them in such a serene setting.

Davis and Buettner make a nice pairing—they both employ weathered textures, offer a touch of surrealism in their imagery and in the placement of elements in their pictures, their color palettes are never jarring, and they both bring a storyteller’s sensibility to their work.

But they are also distinct—you will readily recognize each of their work when you next see it somewhere. And likely you will; these artists are building well-deserved reputations around town.

Davis offers mostly small (about a square foot) mixed-media pictures that often feature slender girls and spindly, leafless trees, along with other elements. Despite their small size, these pictures have an open, airy quality to them. Her palette tends toward pastels and neutrals, making the occasional splash of bold color a delightful surprise.

But I hate it when the little sign next to a painting says “mixed media.” I want to know what the artist used. I don’t know whether this is the artist’s choice or the gallery’s, but if they’re just trying to make the viewer examine the painting to figure it out (not a bad idea), then how about offering a lift-the-flap or other way of letting us know if we guessed right?

Davis’s Web site does tell more about the media she uses and more about herself and her art, of course (www.jenniferdavisart.com). It is mostly a combination of acrylic paint, some kind of pencil or crayon, and pictures cut and pasted collage-style into the mix. Yet she doesn’t overdo the collage elements; instead, they lend a pleasant quirkiness to her works. Most of these pictures appear to be painted on wood panels and scratched to create a weathered texture with a woven pattern.

One of her paintings, “Wild Horses,” features cave-painting-like drawings of horses, very small, on a billowing pink skirt of a girl or woman, surrounded by a neutral background, who is walking away from us while the horses appear to be stampeding toward us.

In “Shelter,” a large tomato-red slightly irregular orb hangs behind spindly trees that are just beginning to leaf out, the golden yellow earth surrounds an aqua mound from which the trees sprout—perhaps this mound is the shelter?

Buettner is not so coy—all of his little labels tell us that these works are acrylic on canvas. And the stories behind the paintings are displayed in one-page panels hanging right next to them. Except the stories are incomplete, disjointed, like snatches of adolescent memories, and the paintings’ representation of the story tend to be rather cryptic and often metaphorical. The viewer is left to infer the relationship between the painting and the story fragment.

“I Love You. Now Eat” features a blue-gray hand offering an anemic straw-colored stalk of broccoli to a chimpanzee head. The mottled texture of the mostly grey background is boldly interrupted by the bright red sleeve of this commanding hand. The story that accompanies it tells of a nerdy, unathletic boy having to meet his classmates on the football team for a study session at the locker room. He feels like a chimpanzee among gorillas, and his mother clearly doesn’t understand.

Buettner’s canvasses are about twice the size of Davis’s, so we go past three Davises to find the next Buettner panel, which picks up on the previous story, but doesn’t resolve it. This painting, “I Wanted To Play Quarterback, or Any Position on the Field,” depicts a football huddle of small boys, a jockey, a running camel, a stone arch such as found on an old sports arena, all surrounded with the textural, weathered, grey background that seems to be a Buettner trademark. Exposed pencil marks add more layers of texture and definition to the paintings.

Buettner is not new to telling stories with his art; a year ago he had an exhibition here of paintings he created along with a children’s story about his two cats—but with none of the saccharine quality that you might expect from such a story. There is some talk of reprising the show. For more about Buettner and his work, see his Web site, www.danielbuettner.com.

The show’s opening is this Saturday, January 7, 7-11 p.m., at Rosalux Gallery in the Open Book building, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis (www.rosaluxgallery.com), and will remain on display through the end of the month.

Daniel Buettner's "I Come in Peace . . . Crunch!"