If you were to cross a memory (an old one, blurred at the edges) with a dream (an unsettling one, outcome uncertain) you might come up with something like OZONE #2 by Ivan Fortushniak in the opening exhibition at Walnut Hills' new Manifest Gallery (2727 Woodburn Ave.), closing Friday.

Fortushniak likes to work in oil on wood panel, a method widely used hundreds of years ago, so it's a reach to the past. "Ozone #2" has an irregular edge along the left side, as though torn rather than cut from some larger piece, and it's set on a backing within a frame that surrounds but doesn't actually touch the work. The frame, dark and battered looking, clearly has a history of its own.

This memory is of a place, unpeopled but charged with recent human occupancy. It is a sweep of lawn or meadow rimmed with trees and shrubs, the colors grayed, indistinct, filtered from reality. The sky at top is outright gray, giving way to a slick of blue which in turn is obscured by puffed white clouds.

Only the sweet sadness of remembered and now unreachable places would be here, except for a strange intrusion at top left. This is the dream part, a bad dream that reality is bearing out. A twisted cornucopia-shaped form extends its horn downward. Its colors are the brightest in the work, a hint of scary orange, some cream-ish white, unsettling spots like those I imagine on dinosaur skin. That peaceful, pleasant, nostalgia-driven landscape will never be the same again.

"Day to day life can be claustrophobic," Fortushniak says. "I paint images of the landscape to escape into an arena of somberness and depth ... . There is a social-political need to comprehend our participation in the transformation of our environment."

Done. I am throwing out all aerosol spray cans, will walk instead of drive, counsel prudence for myself and others. This might not, almost certainly will not, last long, but perhaps will help a trifle. Meanwhile, Ivan Fortushniak has told me -- in the most poetic fashion -- what to expect.