Sometimes in order to see the art you want to see you have to start your own gallery. This is a pretty drastic measure, of course, but it is what Ragan Peck has done.

"There were all these artists I knew whose work I liked," she told me, "but they had no venues to show it. There aren't enough places like SOIL and the Pound"--and now, of course, the Pound has closed. Priceless Works, the gallery that arose out of this frustration, is not a cooperative, but it has a distinct alternative-space feel: a series of linked rooms on the ground floor of a newish Fremont building that's not particularly easy to find (the gallery entrance is in the alley between North 34th and 35th Streets, and Evanston and Fremont Avenues--the address isn't much help). When I visited the gallery recently, the rooms had been painted the bright, slightly acidy green, pink, and yellow of a Peter Max poster--quite a departure from the venerable and ultrarespectable Elliott Brown Gallery (now open online only), which once occupied the space.

Peck mounted her first show last April, with the intent to borrow the space until it could be leased. Then she decided not to become yet another artist brightening up a space for prospective tenants, and she took the lease herself. The gallery's aesthetic is evolving but distinct, and it has a kind of urgency about it, as though tilted toward a kind of work that Peck wanted to see but wasn't seeing. The August show featured three artists whose work drew freely from cartoons and graphic design as well as more traditional fine-art forms. It's a little like Kirsten Anderson's excellent Roq la Rue, although without the lowbrow slant; like Roq la Rue, and like Bluebottle on Capitol Hill, Priceless Works has what might be called a gift shop, full of extraordinarily tempting items made by artists. (I'll be back for the "dangerbunny" underpants.)

Peck, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, studied sculpture and glass art, and has gone through the paces of a glass-blowing career, with stints at the Pilchuck Glass School and working for someone who worked for Chihuly. Her pedigree seems to make her open to artists who do more than one thing, who freely jump from medium to medium, as well as to young artists who are in the process of figuring out what kind of work they want to make. This is a risky proposition--there's a reason galleries wait for artists to develop--but Peck handles it with a great deal of respect and charm. Devi Pellerin, an artist in her early 20s, was represented last month by a handful of paintings, some glass vessels, and a small army of little sewn bunnies that put one in mind of voodoo dolls (Pellerin is the originator of dangerbunny). Some of Pellerin's paintings were clearly better than others, but there is something to be said for seeing an artist find her feet. By the time you get to the paintings inhabited by rabbits, collage, and traditional Japanese elements (the game of go, kimonos, cherry blossoms), you've seen an idea hatched, explored, and developed.

August's show also featured Zoe Dawn Wilson's deft, furious paintings on paper, in which certain images repeated insistently: a skull, a remarkable hunched-over vulture, a buzzard with a long, naked neck. (I had to admire the way Wilson protected the opacity of these personal symbols--she declined to provide any sort of artist's statement, and none of the work was titled; it was impossible not to think of Basquiat and his crown, a kind of frantic waving gesture from the artist to the world.) And finally, there were enormous and fantastical papier-mâché garden animals, in searing colors that complemented the walls, by Francesca Berrini (who had some torturously cut-up and amazingly reassembled maps in SOIL's Speak 'N' Spell a few months ago).

For now, Priceless Works is open only on weekends while Peck makes a living as a freelance glass blower. "But I'm thinking," she said, "of putting an end to that."