Water worlds

ARTISTS aren't always thrilled when you ask them to explain their lowbrow influences, whether these include comic books, video games or gangsta rap. Indeed, artists often believe it to be more important to provide serious commentary on popular culture than to embrace commercial imagery. That's all changing now, of course, as a whole new generation of twentysomething artists begins to step into the arena and exhibit their works, many of which bear the imaginative stamp of childhoods seeped in rich fantasy.

Alexis Amann is one such artist, and on the broadest level her work is emblematic of her generation. Amann's new show, Love and Water, at Atomic Todd (and curated by James Reeves and Dust Gallery's Naomi Arin) is unafraid of telling a story, of being attractive, and of pleasing the viewer. There's even -- dare I suggest it? -- a Japanese manga-like aura about certain works, especially those that focus on young women snuggling with sea lions, falling in love with narwhales and chatting with fish.

One explanation for the Eastern aspects of her work is perhaps because Amann paints with acrylic gouache. Gouache is opaque watercolor; by using acrylic as a binder instead of the traditional gum arabic, the effect is, to this critic's eyes, a bit more comic-book-ish, with a chalky matte surface that makes it more durable than traditional gouache.

The other reason for her fantasy-orientation is that San Francisco-based Amann allows her generation's videogames -- Super Mario Bros., Bubble Bobble, Dragon Warrior -- to influence what she does on the canvas.

"I was one of those kids who used to read Nintendo Power [magazine]," admits Amann, during a recent interview. "I really like the idea of flatness and levels in those games, and that feeling of being so excited as a kid to go on to the next level, especially if it was something totally different looking like a desert or water level."

Amann cherished the sense of mystery players experienced in those games. There were always hidden passages to discover -- secret levels, secret doors and secret paths into other levels. The games possessed humor, too, with recurring jokes like the Nester character that appeared in Dragon Warrior and other Nintendo products. "The Magic of Scheherazade was particularly weird," recalls Amann, "as was Maniac Mansion -- with the teenagers and the aliens, and the way you could mess up and blow up the house so many ways."

Video games aside, Amann grew up on the Oregon coast, where a childhood relationship and knowledge of marine life is pretty typical, and she continues to be obsessed with all things fish-related. Evidence of this obsession crops up in "Girl Communicates with Flounder," which consists of a girl trying to share thoughts with a flat fish who has both eyes on the top of its head. She tries to see things the fish's way by rolling her eyes back in her head.

"I value humor highly," says Amann. "It's interesting to me that humor is found so often in the comics genre, but somewhat less often in painting, at least traditionally speaking. Are the paintings really not funny? Or are we as viewers trained to not react to humor? Regarding my own work, I believe humor can bridge the gap between viewer and painting. But that's not what I think when I paint. I just do stuff that entertains me."

Less amusing is "Sea Lion Pieta with Dead Mermaid," in which a deceased lady of the sea, arm broken off, lies prone and bleeding on the ground. Not funny, and even a tad gruesome. "The Piranha Flower" will also stir anxiety in viewers, as it involves a Little Shop of Horrors-inspired plant monster replete with razored teeth.

"That mermaid painting is about all the dead and rotting things you find on the beach," Amann reveals. "Sometimes there's more death on the beach than you know what to do with. Maybe the ocean makes it a little more bearable for us."

"Voyage of the R-ship, Lady Vomitous" tells a story with just a single static image of ghost women on board a whaling ship in pursuit of a pink narwhale in the dark waters. The story depends on the viewer, but for Amann it's a story of being haunted by something, of having a physical reaction to an emotional reckoning.

So does Amann see herself drawing her own comic or children's book in the near future?

"I would love to do that at some point," she says. "But one of the things I love about painting is the ability to work with fragments of narrative. I don't have to tell the whole story to get at something. I can focus on working with what's actually there and what's not, with what's seen and what's felt. I can work narratively and still work with more traditional painterly things like color and pattern."