A small, almost quiet landscape oil painting summarizes most beautifully the power of the group show now hanging on the walls of the garage and house of the Carol Jazzar Gallery, called “a sense of place.” At first glance it’s a seemingly straightforward view of an empty road

in a flat expanse, heading off to the horizon with a mass of clouds hovering above. But in a second you realize, those are no clouds; it’s a planet, another earth, about to collide with our own (that spherical curve should have been a dead give-away). By David Willet, the deceptively calm painting is in fact utterly disturbing — what “place” is this?

This particular place is curated by the artistic duo of Guerra de la Paz, and includes 10 established and emerging artists, mostly painting. Willet has a few other small paintings similarly playing with perception and the idea of parallel universes.

John Zoller, in several larger works, tweaks with space and scale in another manner: taking as models small illustrations from magazines, he enlarges the images so that his resulting paintings are so distorted as to be unrecognizable as figurative images. The very colorful pieces are not just distorted, but the angles are off as well.

Our sense of place, it seems, is pretty twisted.

John Bailly’s paintings have cartography as a base, with arrows and lines that can resemble troop movements — they are maybe maps of continents or cities as they would be viewed by war planners. Are these places about to be destroyed, or already have been?

These are the varied types of senses of place that Guerra de la Paz wanted to highlight in this exhibit, “selected artwork that surveys the geographic and metaphysical features of a homogenous world, gathered to demonstrate a hauntingly conscious understanding of the expansibility of time and space.”

There is much more here to expand these notions of place: Jessica Wohl’s misshapen suburban houses, with perspectives evocative of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; or the text-based paintings of Francis Acea, who plays with the place of words and meaning in contemporary culture.

As the works here underscore, a sense of place is never one-dimensional or uniform, it is completely dependent on the view, and the point of view, of both the creators and the observers. A thought-provoking and thoughtful show.

“a sense of place” through November at the Carol Jazzar Gallery, 158 N.W. 91st St., Miami; 305-490-6906; www.cjazzart.com.