Installation of “Noonday” from Jenny Brillhart. Photo Frank Casale/Emerson Dorsch

The paintings of Jenny Brillhart have always been somewhat deceptive. While she incorporates collage and generally works within what could be called an architectural landscape, her works really are still life pieces. Quiet, contemplative places that evoke a light and a time of day reminiscent the classic versions. Granted, there are no bowls of fruit or fading flowers in her work – they are devoid of anything living or on the verge of dying – but she works with arrangements nonetheless.

At the Emerson Dorsch Gallery, her third solo show presents some large-scale works in the main room, with some smaller, oil-on-glass paintings displayed on the outside wall.

For “Noonday,” the big pieces in the main room should be seen both up close and while sitting on a site-specific plywood bench that runs along the opposite wall from the paintings. Wood, floors, physical space are part of the viewing experience. Brillhart depicts her own large, mostly empty Miami studio in a light that suggests a lull, a time between activity, maybe noonday lunchtime, or a siesta  late-afternoon. She mixes in elements of actual drywall into the oil paintings, so that physical space truly comes to the surface, yet is captured in a moment. While sitting on the bench, your eye can’t help but follow the concrete floor of the gallery itself before it focuses in on the large expanse of re-created floor painted on the drywall canvas that Brillhart has created in this series. That drywall is sometimes exposed in an almost scratch-and-sniff interaction with the viewer.

The two paintings that make up the Project Room exhibit, “Oceania,” come from Austrian Oliver Dorfer. These works incorporate more figurative imagery – though, like Brillhart, with a judicial use of color – painted on the back of acrylic glass plates: geisha-like women, cartoonish figures emerge and then seem to retreat on these “screens” that Dorfer offers up, portals into a pop-culture that remains somewhat obscured.

“Noonday” and “Oceania” run through April 19 at Emerson Dorsch, 151 N.W. 24th St., Wynwood; www.dorschgallery.com.