Dan Oliver‘s paintings are like film stills from a dream. We sense a narrative is underway, but where it started and where it is going is left to the imagination. Houses, birdhouses, a church, a tent—these shelters are the starring actors in tableaus where the ordinary meets the peculiar. Buildings burn from within, or burst into flowering bloom. Middle class homes appear in strange places like a cave or a lake. In a disquieting fusion of natural and artificial, birdhouses sit atop tree branches like heads on necks. The emotional range of these works jumps from menacing to mayhem, from nostalgic to surreal. Meticulous to the smallest detail, Dan Oliver’s paintings give us clear, impactful images that jolt with cartoon-like solidity. That graphic simplicity married with narrative open-endedness is the signature feature of this work. It sets up a game we are invited to play, a maze to explore. These shelters are erected, protected, threatened and transformed in ways both violent and gentle. What do we make of this endless disintegration, and this endless becoming? How do these unexplained visions map onto our own realities? That is the challenge for viewers in this visual play—finish the dream.