What lurks inside George Peñaloza’s fertile brain?

Judging from his ceramic sculptures, anything and everything. His
brightly colored ceramics feature an Egyptian pharaoh riding a
billiard-ball train; an astronaut turtle holding a tiny planet Saturn;
a bird in an Elvis Presley mask perching on a pool table; a tornado
sporting a tux and a tie.

And that’s just the short list.

Peñaloza’s wild menagerie is now on view at Obsidian Gallery,
in a four-person show aptly titled Flights of Fancy. Under new
ownership for the past year, the gallery specializes in high-end
crafts, in clay, fiber, metal and so on. It’s no surprise that Tucson
artist Peñaloza rebels against the fine clay tradition by mixing
his media.

His primary material is glazed stoneware, but he adds color to his
crazy concoctions by daubing on oils, acrylics and stains. And his
surfaces are rough, with the clay folded, looped and deeply
incised.

Take the male ballet dancer in “Playing Pool, Then the Ballet.”
Tinted in blues, flesh and purples, with bursts of primary colors, he’s
a screaming figure 30 inches high. He’s definitely a man, but he stands
on pointe in his pink toe shoes. As the title suggests, he has more
than ballet on his mind. His head is smashing through the miniature
pool table he’s balancing on his arm, and billiard balls rattle around
inside his empty head. (His skull is open in the back.)

This crazed character is the Gulliver to a cast of Lilliputians
riding the rails below him; they’re skittering around a train track on
wheeled billiard balls. The pharaoh, his arms at that awkward Egyptian
angle, sails along in a yellow ball. Then there’s an 18th-century
French lady in a powdered wig ogling the giant dancer through opera
glasses; her pool ball is purple. An athlete zips along in orange, and
a skeleton rides the black 8 ball.

The piece is beyond strange, its juxtaposition of epochs and icons
like the random pairings in a dream.

At least in “Save Our Planet,” Peñaloza gives some clues to
the meaning of the space-flying turtle. In an artist’s statement, he
notes, rather solemnly, that the turtle “represents the fragility of
life” and that the planet suggests the “interconnectedness of our
existence.” He enlarged the turtle, and downsized the planet, to
demonstrate that every living thing, the tall and the small, is equally
important.

Nevertheless, he gives the task of delivering this environmental
message to a couple of cartoons. The clay turtle sports a lavender
shell. The pocked surface of the moon—where the turtle takes his
one small step—also happens to be the shell of a female turtle
with human feet. She looks up flirtatiously at the manly
turtle-naut.

The calm works of California artist Cheryl Tall, the other
ceramicist in the show, are a relief from the busyness of
Peñaloza’s. Tall creates fantastical images, too, of humans and
buildings, but her colors are soothing peaches and blues, and each
piece has fewer elements. She specializes in tall ceramic women who
vaguely suggest earlier figures from art history. Their faces, large
and lifelike, are serenely lovely.

The figure in “The Touch” has a curly updo, like a classical statue
from Greece or Rome. Her dress is layered in small pieces, like
overlapping fish scales. Dangling between her hands is a golden
filigree strung with tiny eggs and beads. But it’s her face that’s most
arresting: She stares directly at whoever stares at her, looking
through limpid eyes, a Mona Lisa smile playing about her lips.

Another of her giant women, “Orange Zinger,” looks like somebody out
of the court of Louis XIV. A third conjures up the Middle Ages. Wearing
a feathered cap, she’s jaunty and boyish, like Viola in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night. The surprise is that instead of a body, she has a
medieval city: Her head and hands emerge from its stacked-up buildings
and roofs.

The intriguing little “Sunset Canyon” also makes use of
architecture. It’s a house like one in a child’s drawing, boxy with a
pitched roof. A simple landscape is etched into the house’s walls: a
sloping green hillside, a patch of white cloud, a diagonal of blue sky.
Two merged heads emerge from the roofline, each facing a different
direction. In Tall’s hands, the land, the house and the people are
one.

The current gallery owner, Monica Prillaman, continues the Obsidian
tradition of occasionally deviating from the craft party line, and the
other two artists exhibit mixed-media drawings and watercolors. Valerie
Galloway, a Tucson artist who lived in New York for a while, lately has
been photographing miniature desert landscapes in black and white. Now
she’s working on simple watercolors that have an urban edge. Painted on
coffee-stained paper, they evoke the weary world of the café and
the club.

“Miss Paris 1965” is grim-faced, a dour woman in black against an
orange nightlife backdrop. “Black Queen” is also in black, natch,
pictured in silhouette against watery green. “Stormy” at least gets its
woman outside. All grays and blacks, with umbrellas flying through the
air, it has a floating woman wrapped in a cocoon of stripes in gray and
black.

Laurel Hansen’s Egyptian idylls are the opposite number of
Galloway’s cool city pix. Camels saunter over golden sand, and
tawny-skinned lovers lie tangled in the desert. In “The Hand That Feeds
II,” a long line of mountains rise on the horizon beneath a deep-blue
twilight sky. A sunset reddens the hills in “Sweet Pear Dreams.”
Painted on paper fragments that suggest papyruses, these mixed-media
paintings are a nice combination of chalky line drawings and glittery
textured paint.

Dreamy and sensuous as her decorative works are, Hansen has a little
of Peñaloza’s mischief in her. Green pears drop from the skies,
and tiny wooden chairs fly hither and yon. One pear bursts into
flame.

And in her small Prismacolor drawing “Dress Me up but Don’t Make Me
Go Out,” strange costumed characters are out for a ride. They scoot
along not in billiard balls, but in high heels on wheels. A green bird
with a yellow beak sashays through the tiny landscape in a giant orange
shoe. A blue woman in a gown, with flaming golden candles on her head,
sorties out like the old woman in a shoe, in a red spiked heel.

Flights of fancy indeed.

This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2009.