PHOTO: MARC AWODEY

EXHIBIT: Ayn Baldwin Riehle and Janet Van Fleet: “Earth Stories,” acrylic paintings and mixed-media works, respectively. 215 College Artists’ Cooperative Gallery, Burlington. Through November 4.

ARTWORK:“Gene Pool” by Janet Van Fleet

Earth Stories,” at the 215 College Artists’ Cooperative Gallery in Burlington, comprises a pair of shows that seem quite dissimilar at first. Ayn Baldwin Riehle’s half, entitled “Musings from the Vegetable Garden,” is a collection of 18 8-by-10-inch acrylic and watercolor paintings focused on the hues and forms of her garden. Janet Van Fleet’s “Gene Pool” is more conceptually complex, and shares none of Riehle’s vibrant colors. Van Fleet’s constructions, paintings and sculptures are rendered in shades of brown. But there’s an important unifying factor in the tandem exhibition: The press release asserts, “Both artists’ work is grounded in the natural world while strongly suggesting a human presence.”

In Riehle’s work, that human presence is very painterly. All her pieces are close-up views of the leaves, flowers and buds in her garden on Savage Island, in northern Lake Champlain. In her artist’s statement, Riehle writes that she “was surprised at my own new reading of the garden. I found myself compelled to look again and again” at the relationships among the leaves, textures and sometimes even tastes of her subjects.

“Chicory” is a quite abstract piece. Stems and leaves radiate upward from a focal point in the lower half of the painting, like rays in a sunrise. Riehle layered translucent greens and lilac over a pale red under-painting to intensify her hues. By combining watercolors, acrylics and possibly gouache, she played with variations of transparency and intensity.

In “Sunflowers and Marigolds,” broad leaves of varied greens are punctuated by four red flowers dancing over the picture plane. A dozen patches of light blue form a chromatic counterpoint to the reds. “Milkweed” is Riehle’s only vertically composed piece, and also the darkest. A deep gray-black mist engulfs the two plants. Highlights take the form of passages of raw white paper left untouched in the leaves.

Van Fleet’s use of a limited palette stems from a conscious decision. She notes, “The humans on our planet are a delightfully diverse collection of physical types and colors, most of which are various shades of brown, like the soil that maintains us.” “Untitled II” is a non-objective oil on Mylar, 30 by 40 inches, made up of rhythmic diagonal strokes. About 30 brown circles, reminiscent of the buttons Van Fleet often employs in her constructions, are like stepping stones in the pale tan field.

Van Fleet’s title work, “Gene Pool,” gets more specific about human genetic mingling. “Here, I was thinking of people, in all the different colors of the human genome,” she writes. It’s a dramatic installation, 75 by 65 by 25 inches, in which three vertical sculptures made from 6-by-6-inch barn beams overlook a carved wooden trencher. Oil-on-panel faces look up from each beam. The central face is female, and a belly full of egg-like nuts and pods rests in a hollowed-out part of her post. She’s flanked by a caveman countenance at left, and a darker-skinned, curly-haired visage at right. Thousands of red-brown buttons, with a few lighter and darker ones mixed in, fill the 50-inch trencher bowl.

Male identity is both lampooned and portrayed as ominous in Van Fleet’s “Guns and Phalluses” series. She paired found sticks, which resemble pistol and penis forms, with embellishments such as weathered triggers on the guns, and tufts of grass and dangling wooden balls for the penises. Like the Dani tribesmen of Papua New Guinea, who wear absurdly long “penis gourds,” American males in particular seem to hide their insecurities behind .44 Magnums and .38 Specials. Van Fleet makes that connection obvious.

Science fans may notice that both exhibit titles — “Gene Pool” and “Musings from the Vegetable Garden” — could be read as allusions to the experiments of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), the Austrian priest who is ironically known as the “father” of modern genetics. He raised thousands of pea plants and used them to unlock the secrets of heredity. Riehle’s and Van Fleet’s artistic investigations are also exceptionally productive.