There’s trouble in paradise in “Nocturne,” where death is the theme.

The two-person show “Nocturne” featuring Portland artists Wendy Given and Ryan Pierce revels in death, decay and creatures from crows to beetles that speed the process or stand in as symbols of that long dirt nap. Associations between nature, animals, plants and decomposition predominate in this exhibition, which sees signs of our own end all around us, in the forces of nature in an endless process of growth, decay and renewal.

The stage is set immediately upon entering Inman Park’s Whitespace Gallery, by Given’s small mixed-media work “All Things are Possible,” on paper in shades of midnight and soot featuring a skeleton set upon by a vulture. Next to it is a terrifying homemade scythe, also by Given, “Of the Garden: Scindere,” crafted from wood, iron and deer antler. This hand tool for harvesting crops now comes with darker associations with the Grim Reaper. For Given and Pierce there are close associations between the fecund and the doomed, in their link between growth and decay, one process unimaginable without the other, much as plants and fruit only grow as living things break down into fertile soil.

A little creepy, a little sinister, “Nocturne” summons up a range of associations: to the lyrical morbidity of Edgar Allan Poe, the death-tripping visuals of heavy metal, the vanitas of art history and the refined, controlled realm of botanical art, which Pierce tends to take off the rails in his hallucinatory nature studies. Some of Pierce’s most interesting works are his botanical paintings. Those dissect nature’s operations in a phantasmagorical style reminiscent of Salvador Dali, part dream world, part reality. In his painting “Mask for the Desert Rat,” a hornet’s nest takes center stage flanked by melons and a thorny tangle of brambles, and in “Mask for the Bandit Queen,” there are scenes of botanica and woe, images of flowers and barbed wire, bullets and candles, like a vanitas mashed up with “Soldier of Fortune.”

While Pierce tends to handle the flora, Given is dedicated to the fauna: the crows, moths, snakes and other creatures associated with night and death in a series of especially lovely, stylized photographs. In “The Followers of Thought and Memory,” a raven with a glowing white bird’s skull in its beak stands on plush red velvet, a gothic scene with a Victorian vibe.

Less successful are the duo’s ventures into sculpture, which often come off as garish and, occasionally, kitschy. Typically over the top is “Pavo” whose centerpiece is a taxidermied white peacock. Look closer and a tiny white mouse is scrambling up its neck, a last indignity in its already degraded condition. In an instance of life imitating art, the peacock’s feathers were destroyed by insects while the piece was in storage, so the artist has substituted dried flowers, seed pods, leaves and butterflies. But the effect isn’t quite right, more decorative than evocative.

Another sculpture, “Wild Woman,” is a sort of jumble sale of all the exhibition’s themes thrown into such a mad collision it feels like an overlong guitar solo, a crazy riot of noise including a blue skinned woman wrapped in feathers and rabbit fur flanked by a taxidermied crow, strands of crystals, white clay serpents and more New Age ephemera than could fit in a fortune teller’s window.