By Glen Helfand

NEWS REPORTS OF quickly accelerating global warming and the sooner-than-anticipated day when the world's oil wells will be sucked completely dry are hitting the airwaves and cyberspace with increasing regularity. Regardless of where they appear, such ideas fuel fantasies of major paradigm shifts driven by Earth's uneasy relationship with capitalism. How will our lives change when the polar ice caps melt and airplane fuel is a truly precious element?

Artist Leslie Shows, in an assured debut solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery, taps into such free-floating anxieties with her densely collaged landscape images. She captures the psychic vibe of collapsing infrastructures, environmental peril, and the peculiar way we, particularly as Americans, seem to survey the downslide from a cool distance – even though, as a culture, we are highly complicit in the decay. The exhibit, "International Parks," is made up of sizable landscapes that are at once dazzling and calmly nightmarish. They express a difficult-to-fathom position, one of postapocalyptic utopia and dystopia, a retro future of corporate ruins as well as a crafty environmentalism, as the pieces themselves contain acts of recycling. Passages are articulated with pale confetti of hole-punched office paper, often broken down to fingernail-like slivers, lines carefully sliced from ruled notebook paper, tiny images clipped from magazines and newspapers, as well as saltlike grains of sand. Shows sometimes uses paint and colored pencil as a kind of visual mortar.

The mourning after

The pieces combine the artist's interest in social issues with seemingly obsessively hands-on methods. The compositions are generally in hues of gray and brackish brown. They are rendered in the colors of oxidation, strip-mined American landscapes, and rust. Yet Shows manages to dazzle by composing these works with incredible detail and dramatic sweep. These are thrilling images that are simultaneously timeless and utterly contemporary.

The painstakingly produced works bring to mind Max Ernst's war-inspired surrealist landscapes and Edward Burtynsky's large-scale photographs of polluted plains, the rusty salvage yards of industrial ships, and black mountains of burning tires – the smoke creating dark clouds that cast a frightening yet impressive form in the sky. Shows channels the inescapable attraction and repulsion we experience when faced with such grand instances of disaster – be they natural and/or cultural. The attacks of 9/11, for all their ominous implications and insidious aftermath, were well choreographed to etch iconic images into a nation's imagination. With the images in this exhibition, Shows visualizes a nuanced, dreamlike aftermath. They are a series of universal Ground Zeros that, post-apocalypse, has no need for memorials as the population is apparently extinct, withered away, or perhaps vaporized. Shows's vision evokes endless deserts, black holes, and rubble piles, although she combines these unsavory subjects with a haunting beauty.

Communication breakdown

Each of the seven recent pieces featured in the show (five of which were sold before the exhibition opened) reward prolonged viewing. Looking at them, you'll find visual surprises and make discoveries akin to an archaeological dig through a culture that has fallen apart. The vast arid valley of Complex #13, for example, is dotted with remnants of corporate culture and the currently embattled United Nations. In the foreground there's an imposing round council table, a wood-grained piece of furniture that provides a platform for seemingly meaningless ritual and pontification. The objects seems freshly deposited in the wasteland, in the first stages of becoming a gathering place for rocks and detritus. Yet the microphones still seem clean and warm, whether from the beating sun or maybe the hot air of the missing orators. Nearby, Shows collages in images of potted plants in big, round metal pots, the sort of foliage convention seen in the controlled environments of glass and steel office towers. That the plants maintain a green hue in this inhospitable environment indicates that these are probably plastic or silk, artificial elements that seem particularly out of place in such a wasteland. Out of the craggy mountains that loom at the left side of the piece, a stately castle is nestled in the foothill rock – a fortress of imperial power.

There may be a hint of reductive political parable, though with the use of gray tones and open-ended possibilities, it hardly comes off as a diatribe. Communication is unquestionably breaking down in the arena of international relations, and this is an evocative illustration. The situation is more metaphorical in Megaton Ferris Wheel Excavator, Psyclone and Slag Piles, a mixed-media work in which Shows creates a sturdy image from the rickety architecture of amusement park ride, viaducts, and satellite-like forms. The piece is lorded over by an ornate roller coaster in which all tracks lead to a black hole. In the foreground, Shows creates an image of tar pits in which mastodon tusks, whale bones, and modernist furniture are caught on the surface of the oily muck. The scenario makes the point that the ride we're on may be giddy, but it doesn't last forever. Shows's images, on the other hand, confidently linger in the mind.

Leslie Shows's works are on exhibit in "International Parks" through July 9, Jack Hanley Gallery, 395 Valencia, SF. Free. Call for hours. (415) 522-1623. www.jackhanley.com.