Regionalism is dead, but we are still looking for the corpse. Here is the paradoxical heart of Baja to Vancouver, an exhibition of works that both critique and support certain received notions about the West Coast as well as what California-born Joan Didion would certainly call the coast's "own preferred terms."

On the one hand, the five curators (from four West Coast art institutions) point out, there is no longer any such thing as regional art, because artists travel, artists read, artists are perfectly aware of what artists all over the world are doing. On the other hand, artists are inveterate digesters and interpreters of their surroundings. It's a little hard to get your mind around what's invested in this set of conflicting claims, but certainly there can't be a West Coast show without West Coast art, so here we are.

What this show does quite nicely is make us aware of how we assign meaning to abstractions. For example, Liz Magor's KD--the Original--a worn-looking backpack rendered in silicone, with a trail of that insanely orange Kraft macaroni and cheese powder drifting down the wall onto the floor--could speak perfectly well to the manufactured and wishful wildernesses of the East Coast (the deliberately calculated Central Park, for example). But that it was made by a Vancouver artist suggests a variation on that theme, not of nature re-created but nature in the process of being turned into something else, the kind of thing you see in the difference between an area like Auburn (former farmland, now a good place to buy a stereo) and this coast as it was first encountered by white settlers in the mid-1800s. This was "where the trees came smack down to the stones," a character in Annie Dillard's The Living notes, with Douglas firs "17 feet through the trunk, and they all grew right close together, so you needed to turn sideways and tamp your skirt to pass between them."

Glenn Rudolph's moody photographs have caught people in places that are in the process of vanishing, or that no longer exist--a part rural, part suburban population not quite adapting to the changing landscape. Michael Brophy, on the other hand, renders the clear-cut landscape in respectful, almost tender paintings. Both Rudolph and Brophy avoid moralizing (surprising, given such fraught topics), so that the results are tense, complicated works.

You could have made a whole show on the distances between the mythologized, ideal, and real natural worlds and the way we negotiate among them, and it probably would have been very good--especially with Russell Crotty's precise night-sky globes rendered in ballpoint pen. And much of the other work, loosely associated with other themes (entertainment, identity, various kinds of lifestyle, self-help, artifice, and subculture) could also speak to this distance very well--such as Althea Thauberger's Songstress (a series of homespun music videos in which female singers perform against various blissfully natural backdrops) and Stan Douglas' Every Building on 100 West Hastings (a 12-foot-long nighttime photograph of storefronts that has the air of a Hollywood-lit set) and Delia Brown's Pastorale (a slick music-video-style work that features a cast of distressed nouveau hippies in a really nice house--the final break between ideology and style).

The feeling you get from B2V is that of a defining claim that does not exclude--West Coast artists looking at West Coast issues and West Coast themes, but not limited by them. In a way, it acts out the paradox at the heart of our democratic individualist culture (and embodied in Steven Shearer's collage of thousands of nonconformists posing with their guitars) in which we all have access to the same tropes of self-definition. It's a complex show, full of both icons and iconoclasm, and the slightly coy feeling that the curatoriat has asked a question and then denied asking it. But art, thank goodness, thrives on paradox, and much (although not all) of B2V's art rises to the occasion.

I particularly adored Shannon Oksanen and Scott Livingstone's 8mm film Vanishing Point, which features a lonely surfboard drifting upside down in the waters of Vancouver Island's Long Beach, washing ashore, heading back out, over and over again, all to a strummy surf-pop soundtrack. This watery pastorale is lonely and sweet, glamorous and nostalgic, romantic and corrupt. In other words, like most places.