For a little while, a different world thrived in a little glass-walled room in the Fine Arts Building of St. Edward’s University. The world was full of color, life, and odd, silent characters in the exhibition, “Two Crackers and Some Cheese.”

Joe Janson’s imaginative sculptures are surreal and a little unsettling. Strange, pudgy baby bodies with random wooden limbs play with butterflies—or are the butterflies attacking them? Being able to tell is difficult.

This sort of skewed, Alice-in-Wonderland version of childhood is especially obvious in the piece “Lucy Playing with a Friend,” which features a little girl holding a cockroach.

Janson’s sculptures are glazed in some places and raw in others, which adds to the tactile look created by the irregular shapes and grooved textures.

A lumpy wooden zeppelin, with vaguely humanoid, erratically dancing twists of baling wire parachuting from it, hangs from the ceiling.

James Tisdale’s paintings pair perfectly with the sculptures, creating the world around them with bold, chaotic color and bizarre animals.

“All of them look like circuses,” whispered one patron to the air-conditioned silence.

The paintings all incorporate nature in some way, be it a strangely circular tree or a huge mad bumblebee. The animals seem to be a part of the background of the painting, blending with the colors and shapes.

The birds in “Grackles” at once stand out and are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the painting.  The solid black forms of the birds, all looking up, all made of smooth strokes, create and complete a sense of movement encouraged and begun by the rest of the painting. The eyes take the painting in an upward sweep, like a group of grackles taking flight from the rim of a birdbath.

The world of Tisdale and Janson is bright and vivid, strange and unsettling.

There is a dark edge to all the pieces and a thick surrealism that Dali or Miro would beproud of, and judging by the love notes of awe and admiration left in the guest book, the effects were thoroughly enjoyed by everyone who wandered through that strange, temporary world.