Part of an artist's job is to be a spy in the land of dreams and sneak out secrets from the subconscious.

That alone is not enough. Those secrets are encrypted in dream-code, so the artist must determine how much to decipher and how much to keep hidden. Because art is a psycho-cultural striptease, not total disclosure; a dance of veils, not a schematic equation.

If Steve Mazza's so-called bunny-men have clicked with an audience, I think this is why. We've met them somewhere before -- in our own heads. We just didn't know what they were. We still don't, but at least we know that others see them, too, or something like them.

Mazza's bunny-men have become so popular, or at least familiar, they are becoming part of the wallpaper of the Hamilton experience. They're part of our inside joke. People who haven't heard of Mazza may have seen these bunny-men, possibly in a gallery window.

The figures stick with you. Their big ears. Their defeated, unreadable eyes. Their blandly oppressive, rodent-race white shirts and ties. The vaguely Freudian dismemberment of their limbs.

There are no bunny-men in Mazza's current show at the Transit Gallery. But there are clouds.

What they have in common is this tension they set up. A tension between what we expect of bunnies and clouds and what we get. It is the kind of tension that keeps us at once unsettled by and irresistibly drawn into riddles and dreams.

Mazza's clouds are made of paper, but look as though they're made of concrete. We know they're not because they're hanging by the slenderest transparent wires.

The choice of clouds is dicey for Mazza. People love his bunny-men. Does he feel pressured to repeat himself (we're aware of the dangers of bunnies and over-reproduction)?

"There's a degree of that," he says. "They reappear every so often. As long as I don't have to do them all the time."

The clouds may not look as "funny" as the bunny-men but they are equally dreamlike, maybe more so. They are almost bursting into rain with potential meaning.

They look like clustered molecules, they look like human brains, they look like, in Mazza's words, "psychological landscapes." What they actually are is torn-up, mashed-together newsprint.

And the titles of all the cloud pieces in the show, which opened last week and runs to March 28, are the headlines of articles.

"They are full of eccentric moments and information, like the human mind," Mazza says.

Like the bunny-men, the clouds carry a socio-political weight. If the bunny-men speak to the magic-killing, homogenizing effects of corporate Big Brother-ism, the clouds hang heavy with environmental gloom. There is a suggestion, italicized by Mazza's spare but powerful factory-scape painting on the back wall, that at least some of these clouds are human-made.

But no amount of analysis, no lifting of the veils, can exhaust all the mystery in these pieces. Like the bunny-men, what you ultimately get down to is the dream core of the thing, and you're back where you started.

And like dreams, beyond any question of "meaning," the clouds are beautiful and hypnotic to look at, and in so being, bear the handicraft of a careful, thoughtful artist.

Because the show is mostly clouds, and short on figure, it may seem thin at first glance, especially to those used to Mazza's clay pieces. But give this new direction a chance. It is rewarding work. And there is a bird-man sculpture, more typical of Mazza's earlier work. And one of the large clouds sprouts an elegant curlicue of wires, at the ends of which are stylized birds.

"I wanted to play with scale and materials and lightness," Mazza says. "The anamorphic bird-man leads to ideas of things in the sky, clouds and trees."

The show is called Anxious Constructs: Experiments in Paper. The Transit Gallery is at 230 Locke St. S.

Check out Opposite Attractions, paintings by Judi Burgess and Paul Ropel-Morski, at the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts until Saturday. It is an often wry, yet beautiful, look at love, featuring Burgess's exquisite archetypal figures -- here rooted in a courtly, medieval, playing-card aesthetic -- balanced against Ropel-Morski's expressionistic Ontario landscapes.

The Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts is at 126 James St. S.

jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306