“Idylls & Reveries” presents a survey of landscape and figuration with a soupçon of peculiarity - a figure is presented in an unsettling flat plane of color, figures are drawn together in unrealistic portrait settings or a woman is shown facing away from the viewer, gazing just out of sight.

This August group show at VillageOneArt presents paintings by Bethany Bonfiglio, Olivia Chigas, Yanmei Jiang, Von Hyin Kolk, Yingyao Liang, Jane Philips, Hana Shannon, Se Young Yim, Misheel Adams and Deng Xiao. Each artist works in a unique style, at times with unique mediums such as faux leather (Von Hyin Kolk) or mixed media (Yanmei Jiang,) to produce images that have an unsettling effect on the viewer.

Deng Xiao’s talented painting style produces lush figuration that speak to elements of Neoclassicism while folding in surrealist elements more redolent of Modernism. Where Xiao paints in a style considered classically Western, Yingyao Liang combines Chinese painting styles with Western imagery to produce fantastical scenes that transcend either painting tradition; figures from folklore inhabit seemingly familiar landscapes in surreal and even grotesque manners a la Hieronymus Bosch.

Yanmei Jiang’s paintings lean toward a Pop Art style, infusing this aesthetic with a subtle message of gender equality and intimacy present throughout her eye-catching artwork. Von Hyin Kolk similarly works in bright, cheery tones painting with acrylic onto faux leather to mix ideas of highbrow and lowbrow in art: asking us to examine what is familiar and unfamiliar to us, and hinting at ideas around assimilation and the idiosyncrasies of the immigrant experience. Loose brushstrokes and lightly painted figures hint at the role of memory and myth-making in this process.

Artist Jane Philips, in contrast, makes the figure a part of the landscape in works that embrace flesh tones and loosely-worked flora in equal measure. In “Sunbath,” the ability to become truly one with something else is explored through careful attention to tones and compositional structure. Olivia Chigas’ work also demonstrates a keen attention to composition, with a sense of alienation created through skillful linework and the unique placement of the figure in the picture plane.

Hana Shannon’s work also speaks to intimacy and alienation in the use of bold colors defining an otherwise ordinary landscape: a child playing in the wake of a deep navy sky of storms approaching. Bethany Bonfiglio’s portraits adopt Baroque mise en scenes while depicting people from her life: creating a melange of past and present. Each artist adopts a singular style in presenting a world to us that approaches what we find while bringing us through the veil of memory into a psychological landscape of idylls and reveries.