Probing your subconscious for gems of self-wisdom comes with a caveat:You never know—and frankly might not like—what’s lurking there. In MarcSwanson’s case, the Brooklyn-based artist’s journey into self-awarenesstakes place through the artistic process—and it uncovers some dazzlingdisquietude. Turns out, Swanson’s a Yeti.

Killing Moon #3,Swanson’s self-portrait as a Yeti in his lair in the boiler room ofP.S. 1—a stand-out contribution to the Greater New York 2005 show heldat the MoMA-affiliated museum in Queens, N.Y. this summer—was made frommaterials that Swanson’s abominable alter-ego collected while foragingaround his house and the museum.

“The idea was that I would bethe Yeti and basically collect garbage for four-to-six weeks everynight to make the installation,” says the Connecticut-born artist. “Ihad to reconcile the fact that I’m an educated artist who knows aboutformal issues and academia, and figure out what the Yeti would makeinstead—these more ritualistic objects. But the Yeti also collectsthings in the world and then puts them together to sort of make senseof the world around him. It dawned on me that I pretty much do the samething: so I’m the yeti and the yeti is me.”

With such feralself-portraits and enigmatic dioramas—recreating creepy butmeaning-laden forest environments in urban settings—Swanson’s workblends personal revelation with a poignant sense of melancholy. “I’mjealous that Lucas Samaras calls everything a self-portrait,” jokes theartist, who, in all his art, turns personal narratives into a wittyplay between what can be understood by others and what remainsmysterious but alluring.

From Swanson’s restiveimagination—filled with pop culture references and a Romantic longingfor glitter-covered symbolism—emerge some rhetorical bait-and-switchmoves: hunting trophies delicately covered in rhinestones; scratchedmirrors toying with the very meaning of self-reflection.

Swanson’sconceptual lillies often get gilded in such uncanny ways, and his thirdsolo show, on view at the Bellwether gallery in Manhattan’s Chelseaneighborhood through Dec. 3, continues to explore beauty and desirefrom all refracted sides. “I can’t help but make pretty things. Even ifthey’re made from trash, they’re always sort of glinty. I like tochallenge this postmodern idea that great art can’t be beautiful,”Swanson says.

Swanson’s new work has him working intuitively,“building things up like a drawing or a painting and using a moreformal language.”

Dualities pervade in his work. Take hisrhinestone covered deer head, what amounts to a Liberace deer: “Therewere all these dualities in my life that were really strong influences.I grew up in the most republican state in the nation, but my mom was alibertarian, and I was brought up a Unitarian. I think with the deerheads I was trying to make an object that expressed that, this prettysimple synthesis.”

Some of the more perverse gestures in theshow—like adding streaks of acrylic painting to a stuffed peacock—arejust as seductive, if less literal.

The diaphanous glassarrows that puncture the gallery wall are impossibly beautiful fortheir intended purpose, a kind of reconciliation of beauty and power.“I went bow hunting with my dad as a kid, but it just didn’t work—Ididn’t become a bow-hunting marine like my dad, but I wanted too,”Swanson says. “The arrows are like a myth,” Swanson explains, “thatthere’s only one person who can shoot them into the wall withoutbreaking.”

Always and Nothing, the exhibition’s largediorama made with trees from the New England landscape of Swanson’syouth, evokes a sense of mystery and melancholy, a Yeti’s lonely refugeof beer-bottle-filled cages, flags and wasp nests suspended from wirytree branches.

Several etched mirrors in the show, with imagesof a target, a peacock or a Madonna partially scratched off, use theirvisual trick to, well, mirror, the issues they evoke. “When you try tofocus on yourself, something always steps in the way. Your brain isfinishing the image on the mirror while at the same it’s bouncing tolook at you; I think it brings up all these issues of insecurity andnarcissism in between the two.”

The combination ofself-revelation and ironic gesture might make Swanson’s work elusive,but it also makes it evocative. “I try to see all these things and whatthey mean to me. I think that these layers end up with a poetic sensethat people can take something away from, even if it can’t be totallynailed down.”

Swanson proves this is often the case with whatwe find alluring, and the same might be said of the remnants of thenot-so-rose-colored past that is slowly revealed in Swanson’s work.