Valley Life : sights : Grass Roots : Artist tries to understand world by painting homes on a canvas of AstroTurf.

Nobody paints houses quite like New York artist Jane Dickson. Her medium may be old-fashioned oil paint, but her surface is not the traditional canvas. It’s carpet and 20th century America’s synthetic ode to grass, AstroTurf.

Resonating with texture, her inviting yet eerie images illuminate a sense of the safety and security--and the isolation--that single-family suburban homes can provide.

“I’m really interested in trying to understand the world we live in, what it means to be an American,” Dickson says. “To paint houses on carpet samples seemed wonderful. Carpets led to AstroTurf. I’m insisting on the handmade mark, but totally disrupting it with this man-made material. I’m trying to make a humanistic mark in the man-made world.”

A compelling series of Dickson’s homes and garages, most of them modeled on Los Angeles-area architecture, is on view in the exhibition “Jane Dickson: Almost Home” at Cal State Northridge’s Art Dome. She shares gallery space with a mixed-media show of photos and drawings by the late Darrel Ellis.

Dickson, who taught mural painting and drawing at CSUN last year, finds the Dome an especially appropriate space to show her paintings and explore notions of home beyond such adages as “Home Sweet Home” or “Home Is Where the Heart Is.”

“Everyone needs shelter, safety, a home. We’re in temporary housing here,” Dickson says of the Dome that has been home to CSUN’s art galleries since the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “A gallery as Quonset hut.”

Almost all of Dickson’s paintings in the gallery are night scenes of a well-kept, single-family home or garage--a home for cars. From Spanish-style bungalows to simple A-frames, each is surrounded by a few trees or shrubs. Sometimes the lights are on inside, glowing with warmth, but we don’t ever see the residents. Is anyone home? One wants to ring the doorbell and cross the threshold into the inner sanctum, and yet one is also put off, mildly afraid something ominous lurks behind the facade. We don’t know anything about the neighbors or the neighborhood, either, because Dickson presents only one house in each painting.

“I wanted to explore the fantasy of the single-family home where you have your elbow room,” she says. “Home is where you keep out the world and do things you don’t want other people to know about.”

Home for Dickson for many years was not a single-family dwelling but an apartment on Times Square with her husband and their two children, now 13 and 10. When the kids began asking questions about the strip clubs and other seedy venues that dominated the area, Dickson and her husband decided it was time to move downtown to TriBeCa.

“I discovered AstroTurf in Times Square,” Dickson says of the material that got its name from its use in the Houston Astros baseball stadium.

It was 1993 and several buildings in Times Square, including the one she had lived in, had been condemned to make way for the new entertainment establishments that draw New York City tourists to the area today. Artists were asked to create window installations to spruce up the neighborhood blight of empty storefronts.

Dickson’s assignment was the former home of Show World, a strip club. She converted Show World’s windows into a bridal shop--incorporating black AstroTurf into her bridal shop display--which provoked some confusion regarding the images of women and the building’s immediate future.

“All these men thought it was this kinky new strip club,” Dickson recalls. “You couldn’t enter it. They had to peep through the door.

Dickson said she is trying to explore a range of states of mind, from feeling safe and protected to unfamiliarity and possibly being in danger.

“I am drawn to painting things that are challenging, confusing, complicated,” she said. “When painting works for me, I bring up many layers of associations and key into your experiences.”

BE THERE

“Jane Dickson: Almost Home” runs through Oct. 2 at CSUN’s Art Dome, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. Hours: Monday and Saturday, noon-4 p.m.; Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free admission. Parking $1.75 in student lots.