Panoramic Perspectives

The landscape tradition takes some odd turns in the current two-person show at the Village Square Gallery. Between the subtly enigmatic “in the field” studies of Loie Warnshuis, and Dawn Chung’s unusual landscape-oriented ceramics, the show manages to skirt the cliches and convey fresh ideas on a timeless theme.

Warnshuis’ charcoal drawings and oil pastel pieces deal with asymmetrical patches of land, with a penchant for seemingly unremarkable hillsides and roads leading to unknown places. More than the pastels, her charcoal drawings emphasize the raw, skeletal formality of the plant life, just as black and white photography captures detail better than the color medium.

Often, the vegetation in her work is stark and wind-swept, and trees and shrubs take on the presence of unruly masses, off-center in a composition, or clinging precariously to a slope. In other words, these are not just pretty pictures of the Great Outdoors, but more poetic, mysterious visions of nature’s power.

The pastel “Late Afternoon,” one of several pieces here based on terrain in Signal Hill, is a moodily lighted scene of a dirt road leading into gangly dark green trees, underscored by a slight sense of foreboding. “Spring Morning Still” is brighter of spirit, with little bursts of color and an unfinished quality in the rendering.

A fitting gallery mate, ceramist Dawn Chung approaches landscape from her own distinctive angle, a three-dimensional one. Her vessels often suggest, in varying degrees of specificity, the actual contours of topography in the general region.

Bulbous, wobbly-textured and amorphous containers bear titles like “Ojai Valley” and “Gorman Valley,” with radically dimpled surfaces and multicolored treatments that bow directly to their natural sources. “San Jacinto Valley” hints at forms both geological and anatomical, like a body slumped over, with bent knees.

Chung also shows a series of oddly shaped teapots in the gallery, but it is her landscape vessels, with their quirky spirit of invention, that impress most.

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BE THERE: Loie Warnshuis and Dawn Chung, through Feb. 20 at Village Square Gallery, 2418 Honolulu Ave., Suite C in Montrose; 1-5 p.m., Thursday-Saturday; (818) 244-4257.