Valley Life : A Cathartic Experience : ‘Therapy’ exhibit involves huge release of emotions, images.

A strange sort of poetic justice has come to visit Brand Library’s Skylight Gallery. Aptly dubbed “The Therapy Series,” the exhibition is full of postmodern clowning, finger-wagging and demon-chasing.

By the time you get through taking in Donald Forkner’s show of large loud paintings, you feel as though you have personally gone through a therapeutic catharsis or have witnessed someone else’s.

These are big paintings with big personalities, borrowing from the various traditions of Pop art, rock-poster kitsch and mannered, Rorschach test-brand symmetry.

But beneath all the sensory ruckus, an odd feeling of contemplation seems to lurk. Or more specifically, a desire for contemplation, which the artist doesn’t always achieve.

A gonzo, circus-like atmosphere prevails at times, as in “Insanity,” a composition riddled with clowns, scrappy little aliens and a girl with a kitty. In the weirdly lucid piece “Dream,” canine longing is the subject, with two neatly situated pooches gazing dreamily at a billboard for dog biscuits.

Text-based paintings toy with the suggestive link between image and words. “UFO” depicts the classic, stereotypical mushroom-shaped ship in a suburban twilight. “Stress” is a frazzled melange of imagery, including a skeleton as a handy memento mori--or is it a Deadhead icon?

For Forkner, the seductive buzz of pop culture never seems far away, and rears its head openly in the Peter Max-like psychedelia of “Chrysalis” and the rainbow-colored “Angels,” which looks like a poster you might find in your counterculture-fixated uncle’s basement.

In general, the show derives its energy from the giddy headful of things flung at the walls, in the hope that some of it will stick.

Susan Sandler’s assemblage art, showing in the Atrium Gallery, teeters between wit and groaning cuteness. In “Homage to Money,” supplicants spray an altar with cash, and a cash register is presented as a sacred object. “Bull’s-eye” feeds off the contrast of a line of bullets and a macro close-up painting of a flower.

Craftiness of construction is apparent, sometimes more than conceptual depth. In “Ups and Downs,” roller-coaster tracks spill into three dimensions.

Sometimes Sandler hits on a peculiar convergence of ideas in a happy mix. “Propelled,” for example, highlights metal blades to evoke a Japanese fan turned dangerous. A stick and a gray backdrop contribute to its overall poetic reinvention of found objects.

BE THERE

Donald Forkner, “The Therapy Series,” and Susan Sandler, “Hybrid Illusions,” at the Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Through Sept. 11. Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 1-9 p.m.; Wednesday, 1-6 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 1-5 p.m. (818) 548-2051.