What is a tipping point? The moment when we tilt to one side after being neutral? Or, maybe, when we decide something is not what it initially seemed? It’s an exploration that is being asked at the FIU Frost Art Museum in the exhibit “Tipping Points.”

Two FIU professors are heading this exploratory trip: Mette Tommerup and Bill Burke.

With Tommerup’s series of 18, smallish paintings, it’s not so much a matter of spacial perception — in other words, what you see does not change with the position or angle of the viewer. They are figurative works featuring a human (or its body parts) or an animal; fairly literal in fact. With a few exceptions, they are depicted in colorful oil paint with some quick brush strokes.

But what might tip is the storyline. Some may resemble Romantic landscape paintings on first viewing; somewhat quiet introspections on man and nature. Or, perhaps, light-hearted takes on a gnome who is mooning a dog in a Halloween costume. But Tommerup has twisted these first impressions.

They become much darker on closer inspection. A native of Denmark, Tommerup says she is influenced by a movement instigated by her countrymen, the avant-garde filmmakers of the Dogme 95 Manifesto. Headed by directors such as Lars von Trier, the idea was to strip away extra bells and whistles of technology, to let story-telling and simplified craft deliver the messages. As anyone who is familiar with Von Trier films, this simplicity does not mean an easy or expected exploration.

Tommerup depicts several figures in distressed situations: a naked woman passed out around wine bottles, a man hanging — or again passed out? — in a closet. In the first painting, there is an element of playing with the classic nude female lounging seductively on a chaise lounge. In this case, instead of lying on her back gazing at the artist and viewer, this woman is on her stomach, eyes closed. But as Tommerup explains, this image (which she first viewed on the Internet) could be a terrible one of a woman just abused — or conversely, one of a woman who has drank her own wine and suffered its effects.

In one of the few somber-toned paintings, Tommerup seemingly reversed the Rapunzel tale. Instead of letting down her long hair to a suitor below her window, this woman drapes half her body back inside the window, maybe struggling to get back home.

In the front space in the third-floor gallery at the Frost, Burke uses material to tip history and perception. In two lovely pieces — the only two in the room — he fired up glass and seared creatures and images within it. On one wall in a large installation, he preserved a Wunderkabinett of the garden in these glassworks — a carcass of a rat, flowers and plants, to a soundtrack of a thunderstorm. In a sense they are still alive and also not. On the facing wall, he implanted a tiny portrait, also incased in fired-glass. All alone, the solitary little face in the wall changes in its meaning the more you look at it.

“Tipping Points” runs through Oct. 2 at the FIU Frost Museum, South Campus, 10975 S.W. 17th St., Miami; thefrost.fiu.edu.