An appetite for novelty has become compulsory for artists in our modern age, but with the introduction of the internet, genuine innovation is more and more difficult to achieve. Artists remain dutifully devoted to “the shock of the new,” though one suspects the phrase has always contained a measure of flattering self-deception. In fact, our cultural closet may have always been finite; what changes is who has access to it, what items get pulled out, and how creatively these existing bits and pieces get combined and re-combined. Artists advance, paradoxically, by keeping one eye fixed on art history’s rear-view mirror, scavenging styles and methods until some combination of formal virtuosity, personal history, and improbable material begins to look fresh. “Pleasure Spread,” an exhibition of paintings by Tara Sabini and ceramics by Jeremy Plotkin Wong, brings together two creatives especially fluent in this elegant recycling, offering postmodern hybridization at its most assured.

        Tara Sabini dresses her compositions in the wardrobe of art history, the better to stage her own distinctively private drama. Her artworks’ closest relations are the seventeenth-century still life paintings of northern Europe. Like the Dutch masters of that era who collaged together disparate pictorial elements without regard for biological or geographic plausibility, Sabini’s paintings create a composite portrait of her psychological interior. The shadowy forest-floor tableaux of Rachel Ruysch and Otto Marseus van Schrieck (exhibited last year at the Toledo Museum of Art) come particularly to mind. Flora and fauna that never meet in nature keep improbable company in the gloom.

        Sabini adopts the same formally promiscuous method, then turns it inward to the disorderly terrain of the female psyche. Filmy lace, overripe fruit, and guttering candles reprise the older genre’s familiar symbolism of luxury, mortality, and decay, but the feverish atmosphere of desire and furtive shame in these artworks is entirely Sabini’s own contemporary project. In Nymphet’s Last Dance, pomegranate seeds recall Persephone’s famously fateful snack. A voluptuous chair anchors the right side of the composition, ripe fruit nests on delicate lace in the foreground, and a shadowed figure occupies the mirror at left, illuminated by a clitoral candle. Virgin Roulette amplifies and recapitulates the theme, with Venus flytraps, another crop of pomegranates, and fragments of female anatomy circulating through a dark red interior. Forks and other dining-room cues cast the young female body as consumable commodity. Desire and fear are not merely present at the table but appear to be sharing a plate. The result is equal parts seduction and refusal—difficult to look at, harder still to look away from.

        Where Sabini borrows and subverts the conventions of Dutch still life, Jeremy Plotkin Wong works in the creative territory defined by the ceramic vessel. His intimately scaled figures initially register as cute—small, glossy, and almost toylike—but their ambiguous anatomy carries a subliminal intimation of danger. Animated without becoming fully figurative, they behave less like functional objects and more like creatures caught in the act of becoming.

        Wong, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an MFA candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art, proudly acknowledges the influence of fellow artists in his own idiosyncratic work. He has cited the “problem-solving fantasies” of Los Angeles–based artists Nikolai and Simon Haas as creative inspiration (their exhibition Uncanny Valley, seen at the academy’s museum last year, occupies similar fictive terrain.) The playful pigtails of Patti Warashina’s figures find echoes in the tentacles and frills of Wong’s own pieces, and he has mentioned the asymmetric vessels of Kathy Butterly as a creative source.

Yet Wong’s vessels are more than an inventory of affinities. Their smooth, reflective surfaces and candy-colored glazes make an immediate bid for affection, while their bodily ambiguity complicates the invitation. They beckon and repel in equal measure: deceptively unassuming objects with the polished manners of porcelain and the faintly alarming air of something that may have plans of its own.

That uneasy affect, attractive and repellent in equal measure, may define Pleasure Spread as a whole. Still life becomes psychological theater; the ceramic vessel acquires a body and, with it, a slyly mischievous personality. Their work makes no attempt to escape art history but instead tricks it into misbehaving. That may be the exhibition’s real pleasure, a moment when familiar forms begin to look newly seductive, newly transgressive, and mysterious enough to keep us guessing.

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, and a working artist (kalettsart.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.