Conjuring Images, the title of Nikki Woods’ show of mesmerizing works on canvas, panel, and paper at HEDGE Gallery (July 17 – August 31), demonstrates the range and force of this artist’s emerging mastery.  Her perception of painting and drawing as personal ritual serves as a theater to a Maya-like play of formal resemblance and revelation. Hallucination gives rise to omen, dancing with the always indeterminate, always predetermined basis of ultimate realities. Painting in Woods’ hands becomes an uncanny manipulation. Metaphor glides toward metamorphosis.

            Peering from a far corner, Woods’ arresting mid-size Aleister in the Mirror commands the length of Hedge’s main gallery. A very likeable work on panel, it showcases the artist’s effortlessly feminist, intimately casual manner, informed by Impressionist and Symbolist visions.  Influences from Odilon Redon and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec contribute a fin-de-siecle turn of the screw to Woods’ study of her black cat, rendered in reddish brown and black oil paint on canvas. The image intrigues by receding around a visual corner, taking a mirror-step away from reality, presenting two views as if observing a divided self.  Aleister hunches sideways in profile, reflected in a large round boudoir mirror. Scruffy, tufted Aleister (named, as you might hope, after Aleister Crowley, the Edwardian era’s prince of black magic) seems literally bent toward nefarious plans B. A click nearer to real space, and the cat himself crouches facing us at the lower left of the painting, caught in the act of being in two places at once. He stares at the viewer, and past her: “You don’t know me,” say the yellow eyes.

At the other end of the gallery a pair of paintings revisit more immediate areas of experience, summoning sex and death.  The Origin of the World is among the largest of Woods’ works here, and shows the nude torso of a woman rising across the canvas from bottom left to upper right, arms extended. Neither quite as explicit as an outline, nor as abstract as the imaginary limbs of a constellation, the figure moves up and out driven by an explosion of milky tones and movements. In one spot the head of a swan snaps into focus, giving a sense of sudden identity and fluidness to the cataclysmic scene.  Woods’ visit here to “Leda and the Swan” (a myth dear to painters since antiquity) is also a portrait of an orgasm, and an homage to Gustave Courbet’s celebrated 1866 painting of the same name “L’Origine du monde”.

Apparition, which hangs next to it, depicts a skeleton accompanied by waving, conjuring or conjured hands, and tall candles, closely chambered in darkness. A gallery statement refers to Woods’ interest in portraying “psychological slippage,” which is certainly apt in any consideration of Woods’ work at “Conjuring Images” and may also call to mind two further art history phantoms. Standard accounts may not mention Edvard Munch and Charles Burchfield in the same paragraph, but in Woods’ fluently concocted, painterly spells they hang as near  together as these two canvases, bending insight around the hidden shapes of deeper realities.

            Then there are unicorns, and nymphs. Some may scoff, but nobody does unicorns with an eerier, more ambivalent vibe than Nikki Woods. One of my own faves here is  a work on canvas, called “Unicorn.” Its head is seen at the lower left, a horn protruding at a slant from its forehead,  up and to the right. But its ears are donkey-like, and its visible eye would not look wrong on an anaconda. His muzzle is extra long, with strange nostrils and a jaw like Farfel’s (if anyone remembers puppet commercials from the 1950’s). The beast’s mouth is closed, but there is room at the back edge for something like a cigar, if you have one.  Who could not be intrigued by this noir edition of a stuffed animal? Certainly the rosy-cheeked damsel seated in a Midsummer’s Night Dream garden, with flowers large enough to make the girl and her animal companion look fairy size, is eyeing it with possible interest. I love her theatrical mess of hair (possibly a Nashville or drag appurtenance), her prominent eyeliner, and swooping fake eyelashes that curve up her temples like the petals of a Black-eyed Susan.

            Elsewhere in the gallery a wall is devoted to a number of unframed pastel and watercolor studies on paper. These emphasize the fact that this Wood’s effectiveness is grounded in the spontaneity of artistic processes. Lithe application of paint and the fatefulness of mark-making blaze a sort of trail between artist and viewer, by way of her hypnagogic subject matter, dreamlike yet urgent. At the same time they also lead with unusual freedom towards some of the compelling stylistic influences that have meant the most to Woods as an artist. In her works on paper the rich legacy of late nineteenth century pastel techniques, as found in Redon, Lautrec, Degas, Cassatt and others, can be felt like a breeze from a better dimension.

            Making cameo appearances in this show are works by two other artists whose ongoing explorations in paint media add their own depths and virtues to the cauldron. Collectively titled, “Dream Gardens,” their images straddle the poles of life and death. Like a great many still lifes these tend to lean into the “still” part of that, harking back also to the Memento Mori, Vanitas-decrying painted sermons of earlier eras, associating beauty with vanity, and both with death.

            Bianca Fields is a younger artist from the Cleveland area but presently based in Boston. She is becoming more widely known, exhibiting in New York and elsewhere, and is a very good and welcome fit at Hedge. Her oil and acrylic on panel, “Red Givaway” depicts a highly tactile, textured sponge-like or fungus-ish oval painted in a creamy shade against dark red floral shapes, layered and scalloping, set off by light blue areas at the bottom. It also looks something like a monkey’s face, with nut-shaped dark spaces as eyes and indications of nostrils and a curved mouth. In its rococco lushness it could even resemble a Venetian mask.

            Katy Richards is another superb painter working in oil on panel and canvas. Based in Cleveland and a regular at Hedge (she has enjoyed several solo shows there and is represented by the gallery), Richards has often explored unusual organic subjects, textures, and perspectives. Related paintings have studied persons, nudes, self-portraits, as well as underwater or marshland, H2O  infused plantscapes. She and Woods have been close friends since their shared experiences at CIA, more than a decade ago. Richards’ paintings here are flowers, sometimes in a vase, but alwayspainted with a masterly panache, as if they were both ridden down and roped, but also scanned, catalogued, and released back into the jungle. Most of these flowers, as in her “So Tonight That I Might See,” are past their prime, or nearly so, dropping and losing a petal here and there, as if found in a garden in early autumn. The colors are not bright, but the light and shade describe both maturity and layered excitement. Richards weaves networks of leaves and stems, gradations of color and varieties of form that lead the eye in and around her works, as if exploring a truly feral herbaceous border.

            Accompanied by an inspired essay written by Lane Cooper, CIA art professor and brilliant painter in her own right,  “Conjuring Images” and its companion show “Dream Gardens” bring to Cleveland audiences very remarkable works  by still young artists to whom the fact of their gender is both centrally important, and a mere detail of their brilliance, and the intensity of their interest in age-old issues in the arts. Each in her own fashion conveys a brave new/old world of identity, of immediacy, which the interpretive capacity of painting makes available. Here the doors of perception are not so much cleansed, as touched, worked loose, loved.