Artist Carolyn Swiszcz has a knack for capturing on canvas the quirks of a given place and people, and for teasing revealing details from the drabbest edifices of contemporary American life.

Using an ingenious amalgam of painting and printmaking techniques, she draws her subject matter from the unremarkable structures that populate every town: a superette, an aging strip mall, a mom & pop motel on the outskirts of town, an unlovely corporate headquarters. Swiszcz's distinctively streamlined, vivid candy-colored renderings of these everyday locales prompt the viewer to see the telling particulars hiding in plain sight among the humble, mass-produced trappings of the urban landscape.

This West St. Paul-based artist is showing 11 brand-new paintings of local sites and structures, places intimately familiar to Minneapolis-St. Paul residents, in "Innovation Road," on view now at Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis. 

For these pieces, Swiszcz has trained her eye on landmarks: the 3M headquarters in Maplewood (located, appropriately enough, on Innovation Boulevard, which likely inspired the show's wry title), the Walker Art Center, Hope Lutheran Church (designed by noted architect Ralph Rapson). But "Innovation Road" also includes less remarkable sites: an urban corner store, an unassuming Best Steakhouse storefront, seasonal views of an abandoned beer garden.

The pathos in many of Swiszcz's new images is unmistakable. Many of the uninhabited sites seem bereft in their vacancy. Evidence of human abandonment abounds — in the carefully articulated tire tracks in recently emptied parking lots, carelessly tipped plastic lawn chairs, and in the signs trumpeting sales or Lite Beer or nightly campfires, with no patrons in sight.

Swiszcz's body of work offers a dignified, complex chronicle of the settings where middle-class folks spend their days. Hers isn't some two-dimensional dystopian suburban landscape, and she's not presenting a screed against consumer culture. Rather, her paintings betray an overriding fondness for many of these places, a sense that these ubiquitous day-to-day structures belie peculiarities of place that are worthy of considered attention.

Swiszcz's vision of the modern landscape is subtle, witty, and both affectionate and critical. "Innovation Road" offers more than simply a new way to see familiar landmarks, it suggests a new way to see what surrounds us.

"Innovation Road" by Carolyn Swiszcz will be on view at Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis through Feb. 21.