While their styles are different, they both walk up to the edge of the surreal and sinister, Turner Davis, in particular, with his wild, twisted, carnival images in ink on wood.

James G. Davis, a well-known American artist who summers in West Berlin in Nova Scotia, creates beckoning worlds that are familiar and unfamiliar as figures exist in a time and space that is ill-defined. Davis is not afraid of glitter glue and his circles in glittering red and gold can be earrings or floating shapes that take on a nearly symbolic meaning.

He uses miniature hand-made prints and reproductions of his own paintings within a larger image so it’s an enchanting story-within-a-story experience.

The Black Kitten is only a slightly unusual picture of a woman with gold hoop earrings and two black cats except for the tiny print Davis collages in. It’s an odd drawing of a mechanical lobster claw, a human hand and a drink.

The Embrace is a painting of a couple in each other’s arms in a romantic interior with a silver sofa and a gold lamp and a picture on the livingroom wall. This picture turns out to be, in miniature, the exact image of the couple. Outdoors there are dramatic night-time trees and a red moon.

In The Zoo the man sitting with his back to us on a black bench is depicted in such a way the viewer wonders who is the caged and who is the free.

Davis, who says this show is about "meaning as form and the metamorphosis of a pictorial situation," has a full slate of inviting, enigmatic works with complex surfaces.

In this exhibit, he shows fewer seaside paintings than usual, but two large paintings feature with an electric eel in an aquarium.

Turner Davis is more obviously theatrical and crisper in his lines and construction of space even when it’s a series of figures and animals on stage in collage and ink on wood paintings, where the wood is ink-spotted as if it’s the page of a book.

Good Job features a magazine-style happy couple except the man’s head is upside down. Tiger with Hearts is a pink-striped tiger with hearts on its skin. It stalks over the body of a small, prone, human figure.

The painting, Fate, has a blazing, bronze, sparkling surface with a precisely drawn image of a hand holding a tiny dancing, perhaps bridal couple, who are held literally in the huge hand of fate.

Turner Davis likes to use wallpaper-like backgrounds and in the oddly moving and, of course, jarring image Broken Angel he uses a bopping, 1960s circular pattern on which he places two perfect wings, a pair of shorts and above it a blindfolded male head with tears on his face.

In Gallery 2, printmaker David Armstrong continues the mystery in Bent Circuit, an exhibit of monotype prints that are constructed as verticals with floating and grounded shapes. Armstrong treads between organic and electronic imagery and his images have a symbolic as well as a futuristic and sci-fi feel.

The incongruously titled Sweet Pea features a mound that possibly contains plant life and above it a beetle open to reveal a skeletal structure. This beetle reappears in L’Herbe Rouge with a giant upside down bat-like creature hovering over the beetle.

Fallow Mind is like a landscape in structure with a hovering circle encased in blue in the sky, a patch of alive ribbon grass below and below ground a section of wriggling worms. Armstrong, who teaches at NSCAD University, also exhibits an amazing book, Ship of Fools, of 36 etchings beautifully drawn that tell a fabulous fable about a dire journey.

"I’m curious about notions of generosity in creating work: how to leave spaces for people to wonder and generate their own meanings from what they see," he says.