San Francisco painter GaHee Park has filled her new solo exhibition with calm domestic scenes that quietly come apart on closer inspection. Soft Shell, on view at Jessica Silverman through 19 December, gathers recent oil paintings in which glassy-eyed women, laden fruit bowls and sunlit interiors share space with disembodied fingers, watchful birds and a dark cloud gathering over a beach.

Park's signature figures move through rooms where the line between the real and the imagined is deliberately thin. In Woman on the Beach with a Bird, a cloud moves in over an otherwise peaceful scene; in Bouquet with a Visitor, a finger creeps from behind a curtain towards a flower arrangement. The title painting, Soft Shell, sets hard, precise edges against soft, blurred forms, so that the whole image seems to expand and shrink at once.

The show takes its name from the artist's idea of the containers of life that people live inside in order to feel safe, even though those containers never fully protect them. Working through that tension, Park explores consciousness and the relationships between landscapes and interiors, beauty and the grotesque, strength and vulnerability, all filtered through dark humour. In Eating Angel, a white T-shirt and a halo lie discarded on the floor while a cat picks clean a gleaming wing.

Park also turns the language of early Surrealism back on itself. Where the movement's male painters once staged the female nude as a passive dream image, her heroines are sly and direct, drawing the viewer into what the gallery calls a ping-pong of gazes. Painted in oil on linen, works such as Woman and Willow, Woman and Moth in Eclipse and Dream of a Bird keep their surfaces serene while their details refuse to settle, leaving the comfort of home permanently unresolved.