Art review: A talented designer loses her way in this scattered show

Bottom line: Well-executed objects and a spirit of fun can’t hide an exhibition with very little to say.

In Didi Dunphy’s “Happiness Project,” the artist makes a manifesto of girly, retro, bright and shiny objects: logs stacked for a campfire made of Barbie-pink enameled wood, sterling silver tiaras, madly grinning yellow happy faces, neon-bright daisy stickers and costume jewelry.

The Athens-based artist/designer has often featured punchy colors and cheerful design in her work, creating objects that invite interaction whether via her adult-sized seesaws, stools in candy colors, indoor skateboards or her swing sets that blur the line between art and design objects.

In “Happiness Project” at Whitespace Gallery, Dunphy attempts to dig a little deeper, perhaps to offer a critique of what lies beneath 24/7 perkiness, with not always successful results.

Here, Dunphy’s cheerfulness has a sour undertone. It’s the happiness of denial and obliviousness and the ersatz, like plastic flowers in a garden bed masquerading as the real thing. Suggesting some Disney-manufactured reality, in Dunphy’s drawings “Sticker Smoke I” and “Sticker Smoke II,” Dunphy draws delicate pastel-colored logs in saltwater taffy colors where the smoke that hovers above is a cloud of tacky smiley face and flower stickers in lurid colors. In her photographs “Fairie Ring I” and “Fairie Ring II,” Dunphy tops white mushrooms that have popped up in a green lawn with colorful flower and smiley face stickers. In all of those works, Dunphy seems to be commenting upon the human desire to deny and shape nature in the gaudiest terms.

In another series of works, Dunphy paints acrylic nails with designs both refined and tacky: Some of the nails are adorned with Mondrian canvases, others with Hello Kitties and puffy clouds against blue skies. Though it’s tempting to read all of this fakery as commentary, in some cases, these works simply feel like a continuation of Dunphy’s oft-expressed, unalloyed pleasure in slick, brightly colored surfaces. Dunphy has a definite knack for creating beguiling, glossy, appealing objects, like her sterling silver tiaras, one topped with a picket fence design and one with a chain-link fence.

As a visual joke, that clash of luxury and debased reality in those objects is slightly funny, but fit within the larger scheme of “Happiness Project,” the joke falls flat. Fun objects with no connective tissue to bind them feel like an artist having a good time for her own sake.

Dunphy’s “Happiness Project” jumps from real things reimagined in tacky, brightly hued, fake terms to other works that seem more interested in femininity and female pastimes, as in “QVC: A Journey Through the Shopping Network,” featuring photos of cocktail rings on hot pink backgrounds or in a series of graphic designs done in embroidery hoops. A video work included in the exhibition also seems intent on examining girliness. The video features a series of vignettes: the artist dressed in a German dirndl with Bavarian folk music playing in the background; young women in sundresses filmed during sorority rush; two women wearing butterfly wings cavorting in a grassy meadow.

Again, Dunphy seems intent on examining femininity, but the overall effect is opaque.

Dunphy is certainly an artist, or more precisely, a designer, who seems able to manufacture just about anything in her fertile idea factory. She has the skills and the aesthetic chops to create impressive-looking objects with a ’60s-era sensibility, but here they feel like seductive things in a shop window that catch your eye with their slick execution but don’t necessarily astound with what they have to say.