A doll’s house

What you think of Pat Magers’ paintings may be influenced by what you think of family.

If the associations are cozy, Magers has work to fit that bill. If they tend to be more cynical, it would be easy to find ammunition for that, too, in her aesthetically varied, but thoughtful work in Little Family at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery. Family is the source of both comfort and anxiety, depending upon the artists Magers references. With white light streaming in on domestic tableaux of a mother and her children, Magers’ oil paintings can recall the poetic stillness of Vermeer. But the exaggerated cuteness of her images can also suggest hotshot New York conceptualist Lisa Yuskavage’s commentaries on women’s limited roles.

Magers’ paintings focus on a mother, a father, a small boy and a baby. In these jewel-toned works, white light beams into living rooms, or a cozy fire-lit glow illuminates a bedroom where the family sits or sleeps. But this Little Family is just a ruse — Magers’ subjects are, in fact, dollhouse-size creatures who the artist has housed in a glass vitrine in the gallery, laying out her stagecraft in plain view.

And stagecraft is central to Magers’ point. By varying her light, or painting her tableaux from a different angle, she wants viewers to see how manipulated painting is, both visually and intellectually, and how it suspends a moment in time. In certain light or from the right angle, the dolls look almost real. But by a shift of perspective or light, the realism disintegrates and the pitifully jointed clay limbs and hollow eyes become obvious.

Magers seems interested in not only offering commentary on painterly illusion, but in trying to distill the particular airless, time-frozen space of the domestic world families inhabit as well — a place where the racing, manic pace of the outside world begins to slow and feet become sticky in the psychological ooze of family. Magers’ faux-home is a warm, amber comfort zone as well as a set where the characters are immobile and frozen in their conventional gestures until some giant human hand moves them into the next tableau, a possible allusion to the metaphysical machinations at work in our own families.

Little Family runs through Oct. 8 at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center Gallery, 980 Briarcliff Road. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat., 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 404-872-5338. www.callanwolde.org.