Claire Cowie
James Harris Gallery, 309A Third Ave S, 903-6220.
Through Aug 3.

For a lot of people, the idea of "whimsy" (one of my least favorite words) is confined to a shelf of knickknacks; maybe your grandma had them (mine certainly did): kittens, teacups, Fragonard-style ladies curtsying to gentlemen in pantaloons. It's hard to know what's invested in these objects that serve so little purpose--whether their presence indicates something personal or sentimental, or perhaps a taste for clutter, or whether the owner has simply ceased to see them. I find them strange because they're figures taken out of context, with no narrative or formal structure to guide them, wholly complete unto themselves, at the same time mysterious and remote.

Claire Cowie has taken these figures and exploded them. Not literally; rather, she's used them to engage with ideas of place and purpose. It's a rare art show that can draw on some pretty strict and theoretical questions about formal qualities, narrative, and scale, but can also be sweet, funny, and twisted, and Cowie has managed it quite beautifully. The work for Stagings, her first solo show, began with a kind of dollhouse that she built and populated with homemade figurines--strangely hybrid animals and people making vague, uninterpretable gestures--and then photographed. Some of these images were turned into photogravure images, and some of the figures have been painted into large-scale watercolor landscapes; the prints and the paintings plus the figures form the content of the show. The house itself isn't included, and that's a deliberate choice: to remove the figures from the context that gives them meaning and create a tangle of echoes (of gesture, of color) within the larger space of the gallery.

There are the figurines themselves, not your grandma's tschotkes: plaster sculptures covered in white latex paint, touched with odd bits of color. Some of them have impeccably smooth surfaces, like fondant icing on a cake, and most are set into deep, disc-shaped bases. "Set into" isn't quite right: they drown in it, wade through it, rise out of it. Most of them are animals, and they're pretty damn cute, which is and is not the point--you project onto them those squishy emotions reserved for pets, but the hard surfaces resist your love as well as your interpretation. Some of them are creatures that could have come straight out of Greek mythology--strange animal-human combinations, cloven-hooved women, a man with a moose head growing out of his huge noggin.

Alone, these figures would be interesting enough, but seeing them painted into big, deft watercolors creates a serious shift in framing, a whole new world. Even when the painting bears no distinct horizon, they become faint figures in a Japanese scroll, the inhabitants of a dollhouse seen from an omniscient and privileged viewpoint. The walls of the gallery become the walls of a house, and suddenly you notice how glances between the creatures and the paintings are zipping around you. Next to one of the paintings is a gorgeous, drippy sculpture of a kangaroo; he seems to look at the painting, at the other figures, and then back at you. There you are, an inhabitant of the very house you're observing.

Or perhaps just a guest. Cowie's photogravures expand and project her world into a series of cinematic gestures, shady and grainy depictions of scenes that are obliquely emotional; in one, Mr. Moose Noggin confronts a curl of thorny branch in a tight space, and suddenly his indistinct expression becomes one of frank anguish and boiling fear. These prints give the figurines an added layer of history and dignity, and of remove, confirming what many of us have always suspected about the secret life of objects--namely, that they have one, and it has nothing to do with our bullying human machinations.

The installation of Cowie's work is deceptively loose, with platforms of different heights throughout the gallery, the paintings cheerfully and brightly lit. But the more time you spend in it (and you should aim to be alone there for at least a little while), the more it adds up, knitting its elements together. It's hard to tear yourself away, hard to shake the feeling that something's going to happen when you're not there.