When gallery artists venture deep into popular culture, they can end up in any number of realms—anywhere from the world of gaudy, shiny things, to the bloodied and bruised lands of death and trauma. Zeitgeist’s current show runs that range through the work of three artists: Rob Lentz, Tim Dooley and Jonathan Fenske. Lentz occupies the dungeons and subterranean realms of human experience as manifest in our locally favored arena of cultural self-reflection, country music. He declares his intentions in a simple piece, “Pantheon,” a terracotta Kleenex holder adorned with portraits of George Jones, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell. This set of icons marks out a familiar sort of hard-country alternative history running parallel to the record-selling machine of the Nashville Sound. The title and commemorative portraits treat the four as gods, and like any good gods, they come along with mythologies and stories that resonate with human experience. Even with this serious purpose, the piece is still a tchotchke, like something you might buy at a downtown Nashville souvenir shop. You can’t really have country music without readily accepting combinations of the crass and the profound. Lentz’s work delves further into these myths. Another terracotta Kleenex holder called “Widow” features a woman lying voluptuously on the top reading a book. The woman represents Billie Jean Jones, who was married to both Hank Williams and Johnny Horton before they died early deaths. The sides of the box have medallions of the two singers around a shot glass—Williams drank himself to death, and Horton was killed by a drunk driver after having premonitions of his own death. The woman seems oblivious to the tragedy but somehow tied to it. The rest of Lentz’s pieces are dioramas built into things like old radio cabinets and wood boxes, depicting moments like Johnny Cash’s baptism or Lefty Frizzell’s incarceration. Each one is spooky, dealing with the troubled nature of the musicians’ lives. “Nickajack Cave: Johnny Cash Visits the Underworld With the Ghost of Johnny Horton, Ferried by Chickamauga Warrior Dragging Canoe” has a very long title that effectively explains the scene depicted. It starts from a real-life incident—in 1967, in the depths of addiction and career and personal troubles, Cash went into a cave near Chattanooga to die, but, after a spiritual experience, decided to live and found his way out. Lentz elaborates on that scene, with small figures of Cash, Horton and Dragging Canoe in a boat floating on an underground river lit from below, confronted by the ghost of Cash’s father, who holds up the bloody clothes of the singer’s older brother, who died in an accident. The skeleton of a Confederate soldier lies in the foreground. The South’s psychic history comes through in the blending of several kinds of mythology—the hero warriors of Native American history, the hard lives of country music singers, the Civil War and the ancient Greek myth of Charon, who ferries souls across the underground river Styx. The spookiness is both a reflection of Cash’s haunted history and a product of Lentz’s mythopoeia. Part of country music’s power is that it provides the material for any number of personal histories. With the art of Tim Dooley, we enter a glaringly bright world of cartoons and graphics remixed with a sense of lightning speed. Dooley’s main work here, “Mixed Product,” is an installation that morphs each time he exhibits it. It consists of a series of paintings and cutouts hung from or attached to the wall, mixed in with shiny fringes and ribbons and other elements, like fake fur-covered boxes sitting on the floor connected by cords to fake fur panels on the wall. The pieces mix abstract shapes with fragments of cartoon images like the gloved hands of Mickey Mouse and other visual quotes. A photo of Burt Reynolds surrounded by a bright corona floats over two cartoon hands with holes punched through the palms, stigmata transformed into cookie-cutter apertures. Eras mix together—a detail from an older print of a man wrestling with a squid or octopus (an illustration from an edition of Jules Vernes’ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), Pacman-like critters, patterns and figures that could have come from 1960s psychedelia. One of the first (or, depending on where you start, last) pieces includes a gray-bearded head that looks like an R. Crumb drawing. The images come in bunches all along one wall and a thin partition, and give the impression of many quick cuts. On one level, “Mixed Product” is about establishing a visual rhythm, and seeing in a way that parts of images are detachable and available for recombination. Within that facile jumbling of image parts, emotional content pops up, thanks to the power of cartoons to efficiently convey emotions with the fewest possible strokes. Dooley’s other piece in this show, “The Conversation,” is a series of black-and-white digital collage panels. Each panel is associated with a member of the Bush administration, with titles like “Powell (the Shaky Showman)” or “Wolfowitz (Misinformation).” The panels contain some of the same images as “Mixed Product,” like the gray-bearded figure or detached cartoon heads that are all mouth. Some images relate to the titles fairly clearly, like the egg shape with wings surrounded by a couple of lines to indicate shaking (in the Powell panel), or the ominous silhouette of a fighter plane in “Bush (The Voice in His Head Is Not God).” Other images are more abstract or harder to pin to the title. All of the panels are connected by spiral lines that look like telephone cords passing from one panel to the next. Dooley uses the minimum number of strokes necessary to create a mood and make his political commentary. The third artist, Fenske, uses cartoon-like imagery in a more narrative way. He stages scenes populated by vintage children’s toys depicted as if they were stop-action figures. In “First On, Last Off,” a toy school bus is being driven by a round-headed doll, and another doll is sitting alone toward the back. On the left side of the frame is a black-and-white drawing of a forlorn child in shorts, out of proportion to the bus and occupying a different perspective space. This and the other paintings use children’s toys to articulate everyday childhood pains like loneliness, rejection and fear—feelings that maintain a powerful psychological hold on the adult consciousness. Popular culture has been fair game for gallery art since at least the early 20th century, and any remaining barriers certainly fell when artists like Andy Warhol started making things that looked identical to Brillo boxes. Pop images give artists the chance to lead with something that can be inherently fun for the viewer, and from there artist and viewer can see where and how far they want to go. Lentz and Dooley in particular create work that succeeds in entertaining, yet offers much more. Lentz invokes greater forces through his own earnest myth-spinning, and Dooley pushes structural propositions of rhythm and fragment to the point where they generate new meaning.