PENELOPE GOTTLIEB  received her B.F.A. from the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena,and went on to earn her M.F.A. from the University of California in Santa Barbara where she currently lives and works. Gottlieb's latest paintings appropriate a methodology common to both Surrealism and the Baroque, namely the linking together of heterogeneous, diverse orders of things – in this case the normally separate analytical syntax of Audubon and plant biolog—in the form of a representational "mash-up" or "heterotopia." Painting directly over pre-existing Audubon prints, Gottlieb literally envelops the birds in a tightly woven braid of plant leaves, tendrils and tentacles, so that what would normally be part of the birds' natural habitat has suddenly turned on them as a form of domestic colonization. Gottlieb thus raises implicit issues of power/knowledge in relation to systems of classification in addition to her more explicit ecological critique.