A tract of 118 small paper houses fills a case at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla. Each house has the same floor plan and is 1-½-inches tall, but each is decorated slightly differently. One appears to be covered in cashmere, a second is dotted with eyes, a third is punctured by pins and another is thatched with thread. Together, the petite housing development covers a three-by-six-foot area. These paper houses are an artwork by Sally Hagy-Boyer in an exhibition entitled Phase Space, which also showcases her artist’s books and paintings on paper.

The petite tract of houses, entitled “Housing Elements” (2009), overwhelms a viewer with decorative details. The tiny houses are so detailed that they appear to be a collection of 118 different artworks, and each is really cute—perhaps too cute. Actually, much of Ms. Hagy-Boyer’s work suffers from cuteness. The artist repeatedly ornaments paper then makes it into artist books and cuts it into small paintings. Ms. Hagy-Boyer states that she is “always searching for and devising new techniques to express [her] ideas. Sometimes the technique takes on a life all its own….” Most of the work in this exhibit features the technique of encaustic and oil on paper.

Using oil and encaustic on paper becomes the sole subject of many of Hagy-Boyer’s works on view in this exhibit. It is an attractive formula. In her one-of-a-kind artist book entitled “Phase Space” (2008), which inspired the title of the exhibition, several pages are smeared with oil and wax encaustic to create a surface akin to an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter. Even though each page looks good, the book’s small scale makes the pages seem like pleasing texture samples rather than fully realized artworks that command attention or fully engage a viewer.

Many of her artworks in this exhibition are collections of objects. In “Choose Your Token Series” (2009), she combines 12 uniformly framed word phrases with 12 small drawn images on pieces of vellum. In one frame a drawn Scottie dog accompanies the phrase “You don’t take sides.” In a second frame the phrase “You’re a pushover” is combined with the image of a wheel barrow, and in another frame the phrase “You are full of charisma” is associated with a seahorse. Again, they are all cute but fail to command.

Really strong is Hagy-Boyer’s work entitled “ABC Wire Installation” (2009). This artwork is a collection of every single letter from the alphabet made from found bits of wire that resemble the individual letters. Each wire letter has a surrealist Rorschach quality that lends an opportunity for a viewer to see the letter rather than being a perfect illustration of it. Mounted on a gallery wall, the letter A is made from coiled bailing wire that looks like a three-dimensional, awkwardly drawn letter "A" as practiced repeatedly over itself by a small child. The letter "F" is made from wire twisted around a bent bolt, and the letter "G" is a stout, flattened piece of barbed wire. The many pieces of stray bailing wire, barbed wired, and coat hangers have been collected by the artist since 1982. In this particular artwork, the impish fetishism that prompted these objects to be collected combined with the imagined struggle to find each unique piece of wire makes for fun, fascinating and resonate viewing.