An adventure. That’s what we experience each time we set out to explore the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum. It’s interior and exterior spaces reward our curiosity, patience and passion for all things artistic and natural. Charles Umlauf, whose more than 130 sculptures, drawings and paintings are housed here, collaborated with nature, whether working in a realistic style or one of organic abstraction. His work, beginning in the 1940s, both acknowledged his artistic forbearers and also presented fresh approaches that expanded his visual vocabulary. So, too, does the artwork of Stephanie Wagner, the 2007 Umlauf Prize recipient. She leads us on an exciting visual and art historical journey employing the age-old ceramic tradition. Wagner creates an installation of exotic clay dogs and cats whose elaborate adornment, majestic stance and preening appear as visual confections in an otherwise basic gallery space. Each one is unique in type and color yet somehow depends on its relationship to the others for its true meaning, familial in essence. These creatures are regal and kitschy, beautiful and strange. The animals’ unnatural hues (blues and purples) and sophisticated embellishments refer to the decorative arts of the rococo and the tables/pedestals on which they sit allude to the spare lyrical designs of 50s icons Eames and Saarinen. They exist as both sculptural objects and decoration. It is as if Wagner has compressed centuries of art, craft and design into a tightly compact room and forced all to coexist in blissful serenity. The artist’s ability to transform our understanding of form, time, space and design excites me most when looking at her work. Her objects straddle the artificial boundaries that have separated sculpture, decorative arts and design for generations. And in today’s world where every category is blurred and overlapping this installation symbolizes the kind of harmonic synthesis for which we are all yearning.

Fantasy life requires a lot of tweaking to assume a communicable form. In Stephanie Wagner’s On the Horizon, currently on view at Art Palace, successful translations of this kind lead viewers to almost believe in the existence of the show’s imaginary landscapes.

Last summer, in Fever at the Creative Research Laboratory, Wagner’s sculpture of a decaying wedding cake showed the wilting of a frilly ideal. In a refiguring of the same concept, the artist’s modified monotypes at Art Palace suspend ideal views of delicate, organic systems. Her All I Need is You, a stunner in silver and sunlight-yellow, posits the growth of a gray mesh in a vaporous atmosphere. Finished portraits of unfinished processes, this set of monotypes explores the inaccessibility of two-dimensional forms as a means of protection for fragile imagery.

Wagner’s watercolors employ a loopy cartography for sketches of tenuous tropical cities strung wishfully with electric lines. This longing for imagined spaces inflects the show with dreamy invocations: on the horizon, once upon a time and in a kingdom by the sea.

Dorothy Meiburg lives in Austin, where she writes essays and poems.

Stephanie Wagner is more graphic. Blush! Using ink, paint and watercolor, Ms. Wagner gets her swirlies on. Her color palette remains for the most part girlie and lacy. Black, white and a fleshy tone are used alot. Her California Dreamin’ series and a couple of larger works use this rainbowy, psychedelic palette, which goes really well for the west coast imagery. In the largest work in the main room, those colors combined with the brush movements give the piece a jungle/ botanical feel. Things feel alive and disgusting, like some sort of fungal growth. Speaking of funky things, her titles are awesome. Take Me On, Like This and Like That and Like This, its like watching old music videos!

The forms in her work are playful and attractive in the sense that they resemble the doodling found in high school notebooks. Ms. Wagner seems to just swirl and swirl. On the other hand, the swirls can sometimes appear like chandeliers and other times they look like an oozing net. They are pretty and grotesque at the same time. Is that what California is like to anyone? I keep hearing stories of how wonderful the west coast is, but the people are as fake as their silicon breasts. There is something dangerous about the towering, spidery palm trees in the scribbly, colorful, (wishy?)washy landscapes.

Alright, alright, I… will go… with… GREAT.

Its like that and like this and like that, So jus’ chill, ’til the next episode. I’ll tell you ’bout what I sees.