AIN’T NO SACCHARINE HERE

Jennifer Davis at Cerasoli Gallery

By Kate Williams

Minnesota-based artist Jennifer Davis’s show, Wish You Were Here… opens in October at Culver City’s Cerasoli Gallery, and looking at Davis’s paintings, we do wish we were there. “The ‘here’ is the fantasy land of my imagination,” she says. “It’s of the surreal, dreamlike, candy land variety.” Full of funny wildlife (petulant walruses, poodles with wigs) and wistful girls, often thrown together into make-believe parties and revelries, her work is feminine and delicate, but maintains a sense of humor that keeps it from crossing into the saccharine. Davis, who’s been a full time artist since 2003, works by building up layers of paint and then sanding them down before she paints over it again, and often allows ghost-like images of the first renderings to appear in the final. The end result is pictures pretty enough to satisfy the most demanding sweet tooth. Opens October 11. For more information, see cerasoligallery.com.