Jumble up your sense of reality and imagination with works by three artists

It's often said that one function of art is to make you see everyday life differently. The connotation being that it heightens the mundane. You leave a gallery and a plastic bag blowing down the street seems somehow transformative.

But sometimes art creates a parallel world that is so appealing and oddly familiar that it makes everyday life seem lackluster. That's the effect of a pair of strangely transcendent two-person shows that share an aesthetic adventurousness and have an artist in common.

Justin Gibbens is a busy man. His drawings appear in two shows right now. At Punch Gallery, his work appears alongside Amy Ross's as part of "Animal Spell" and at G. Gibson Gallery he shares "Unnatural History" with photographs by Nealy Blau. The three artists each take on nature with divergent artistic tactics that compliment each other.

Blau's photographs are a subtly sly parsing of reality and what we expect of our nature and landscape art. Blau photographed dioramas at various Natural History Museums across the U.S. and the results are lush, melancholic portraits in which the artificiality isn't immediately apparent.

The rich color palette recall the sets of the narrative photographer Gregory Crewdson and the landscapes of the "Forest" series of photographs taken in the Czech Republic by Jitka Hanzlova, creating a near-dream state or fairy tale. It's as idealized as Crewdson's meticulous cinematic visions and Hanzlova's homeland nostalgia.

On close inspection, the branches and waves and moss of Blau's lush photos don't give up their secret. Instead they play into our fantasies of reality. With retouching and digital enhancement de rigueur, we are accustomed to images like Blau's "Columbine" with its stilled dawnish light and misty clearing. Blau brings us the fake so we can immerse ourselves in our myth of nature. We love the land, especially when it's a perfectly composed stage set.

Boston-based artist Amy Ross creates exacting and elegant watercolors. She paints birds and branches and mushrooms. The hitch is that they are quite often all three at once or in some combination. Her birds have mushroom heads or sprout perches rather than wings.

Her technical precision is matched by her romanticism. Of course, her romantic view of nature is closer to something out of Mary Shelley. Her Frankensteins are hybrids that suggest lovely depictions of botany gone horribly awry.

They also show how we tend to lump nature together as one thing -- flora and fauna are the same to us. In "Goose Magnolia," the bird seems to hatch from a flower. Mushrooms sport antlers or woodpeckers are crowned with mushroom heads. These trippy visions suggest Alice in Wonderland at a nature conservancy.

Gibbens, for his part, riffs in both directions. His animals in both shows are mythological, like the unicorns that adorn old tapestries or fire-breathing flying reptiles in children's stories. Gibbens' "Birds of Paradise" are inspired by John James Audubon. The series of watercolor drawings transforms Audubon's species into spectacular variations.

His watercolors use not only graphite and gouache but oolong stains that give the work the effect of aged book pages. Another medium listed in both shows on a few works that feature sparkling unicornlike horns is listed as "magic on paper." It doesn't come across as twee or whimsical.

The animals and their worlds are so fully realized that three-headed black-necked stilts and fire-breathing chimney swifts seem like fantastic illustrations of a compelling and long-lost fable. The hybrids suggest the flip side of natural history: the wilderness of the imagination.