I'VE NEVER BEEN much for landscapes. I like them well enough when I'm in them (which, I guess, is inescapable), but the painted versions for the most part leave me cold. Bierstadt, Moran, even the Impressionists--I find the paintings heavy-handed with nostalgia, a longing to be somewhere else. There's rarely evidence of the kind of rigorous thinking that makes art exciting.

But those smart folks at Consolidated Works have had the good sense, by attaching the important qualifier "imagined" to the title, to take the idea past the usual arrangement of trees, boulders, and horizon, on to the landscapes of the mind. "Imagined Landscapes" is a theme that threads through all of ConWorks' genres (art, film, music, theater), but for the visual-art exhibition, curator Meg Shiffler has interpreted it quite specifically, choosing to focus on the landscape of the dream.

The show's highlight, for me, is a two-sided mural by the late Henry Darger. Darger was a recluse and eccentric, quite possibly insane, whose work was only discovered (along with thousands of empty Pepto Bismol bottles and balls of string) after he died. The mural, one of many, was created to illustrate Darger's 15,000-page manuscript, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal of the Glandico-Angelinian Wars, as Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." It's a story with obvious Catholic undertones--the godless against the good--and the mural reads like a work by Hieronymus Bosch. It teems with figures, in this case little girls; some dressed, some naked, some adorned with horns. (None of them in this particular work are equipped with the penises that have puzzled art scholars.) A disembodied hand comes out of the trees to choke one of the girls, and the others worry about an impending storm, arguing among themselves (through cartoonlike thought bubbles) about whether it's a line squall or a tornado. Darger was a self-taught artist who often traced figures, or cut them directly out of magazines. His obsessions (little girls, weather) are translated unmediated onto the paper, and the result is the most personal kind of nightmare. Darger imagined a landscape, a whole world, so completely that one has the impression it was more real to him than the actual world. This work is absolutely stunning, and it requires a good amount of careful looking to take it all in.

Nearby are two canvases by James Barsness, an artist from Athens, Georgia. These works are also crammed full of figures. One of them, Shiffler pointed out, resembles nothing so much as a teenage boy's notebook cover, layered with ballpoint doodles, cartoon characters, and boobs. It's an intense work, also with a lot to look at, but the other work is more interesting. It's similarly layered, with sheets of music and comics underneath, but it's painted, as opposed to inked-in. It's a landscape that's vaguely familiar, dark, with boxy structures, and filled with figures doing unnamable (and some unspeakable) things. The structures look proto-Renaissance, or perhaps de Chirico, abandoned despite the evidence of life. The crowded, active, slightly cryptic canvas reminded me of the work of Bill Fellows, a Seattle painter who moved to Los Angeles last year, and similarly of the 19th-century Belgian artist James Ensor. I throw out all these references not to show off (well, perhaps just a bit) but because the presence of all these disparate elements co-existing in one work is the kind of disconnect that is possible in dreams. Every few years I have what I call a cast-of-thousands dream, in which people I haven't thought about in ages all show up. That's what Barsness' work is like, though considerably more unsettling.

Shiffler is a generous curator, and by this I mean that she chooses work that is approachable and variously interpretable. She's modeled the show to her vision, but it doesn't exclude the possibility for other kinds of meaning. Mariko Mori's video Kumano does, to be sure, take place in various dreamy landscapes, but it also meditates on privacy and culture and symbolic weight. M. K. Guth's cast-resin kitchen speaks of the suburban domestic landscape, but also of how insufficient memory is, how dreary the actuality. The strength of this show, besides the redemption of the landscape, is that it reminds us how plastic and familiar our dreamscapes are, how ethereal and yet (to our psyches) how very real.