At first, Dana Wigdor’s paintings look like realistic winter landscapes.  Mountains, snowy fields rimmed by fuzzy hedgerows and puffy cloud-filled skies form and recede in a hazy range of off-whites, steel gray and black.

But it isn’t the fine landscapes that grab your attention:  It’s the mysterious whirligigs hovering in the sky or alighting on the snow like giant dragonflies, or MQ-1 predator drones, that catch your eye.

Incongruous and strangely mechanical as they are, Wigdor’s battleship gray, robotic creatures are believable in her bleak winter pictures of wilderness.  Her subtle use of black and white allows her vehicular contraptions to fit into a natural world that has become a kind of twilight zone.

Each of her seven large oil paintings in “Liminal Places” on view at the Spotlight Gallery in the Vermont Arts Council building in Montpelier this month is a variation on a theme one might call sci-fi meets Ansel Adams.  The paintings conflate the familiar and the strange, in a natural, if disarmingly haunting way.

The show also features her “miniatures”.  These are tiny drawings, maybe four square inches each, in pen and ink and colored pencil.  The drawings of objects and figures reflect Wigdor’s penchant for the fantastic and futuristic.  She offers abstract images that come off as light, funny, even cartoonish.  In one untitled miniature, a flying saucer hovers above the ground.  A bird sits atop the saucer staring at a creature that looks like a bug with a large abdomen attached by a slim black line to the head.  Nothing about this image is representative;  it strongly invites interpretation.

Wigdor, who lives in Brattleboro, has had work appear in several galleries in Southeastern Vermont, including the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and the Windham Art Gallery in Brattleboro.  This is her first exhibition in Central Vermont.

Her paintings achieve a rare balance between the conventional and the outrageous.  Wigdor seems to see the beauty and the terror the world holds simultaneously.  It’s a dual vision that reflects our relative isolation here in rural Vermont and the way in which the outside world interrupts our reverie with news of the CIA’s heat-seeking probes that destroyed an enclave of “terrorists” (including women and children) in Pakistan, or of the drones in Iraq controlled by Department of Defense personnel via laptop in the States.  It’s a duality of perception that seems particularly apt now, as we go about our jobs and household chores. We’re a nation at war, as President George W. Bush likes to remind us.  Remember?

“Liminal Places” is on view at the Vermont Arts Council’s Spotlight Gallery through the end of March.  The gallery, located at 136 State St., is open 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday.  For more information, call 828-3291.