Have you been dying to view paintings of murder, corpses, and Weapons of Mass Destruction? Have you been struggling to find the perfect gift for your gothic friend? If the selection of posters and cheap black-light “artwork” at Hot Topic isn't up to your high standards, run, or better yet drive, to the CoproNason Gallery's Particles of Solitude exhibit.

Artists Nathan Spoor and Joey Remmers provide some of the most carefully constructed frights this side of Anaheim (particularly Disneyland's Haunted Mansion; although Orange County as a whole can be quite terrifying.)

Spoor is most successful when he fills his canvases with ominous yet refined swaths of glossy black paint, with the cutest little Weapons of Mass Destruction being the only sources of light. The real stars of Spoor's paintings are the missiles, complete with candy cane paint jobs and a little pink shirt hanging in a hollowed-out WMD – a brilliant idea for those in need of more closet space and a tip I've yet to see on “Extreme Home Makeover.” The juxtaposition of childhood, happiness, and WMDs lingered in my mind for quite some time.

I must admit that I took a few moments searching each of Remmers' winter scenes for Jack Skellington and his dog Zero. The Tim Burton-esque landscapes and spooky barren trees are the perfect setting for Remmers' paintings of murder and solitude.

In A Permanent Solution to a Problem a girl that could easily be mistaken for a Suicide Girl is preparing to plunge a male corpse into a beautifully purple snow-fringed pond. The aforementioned trees jut into an equally purple sky. Even the swan (or perhaps a crane, I'm an art critic not an ornithologist) appears quite daunting, and as we all know, making nightmare-worthy waterfowl is not an easy task.

CoproNason Gallery is located in Bergamot Station at 2525 Michigan Ave., T5, in Santa Monica. Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 1 p.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (310) 829-2156 or visit www.copronason.com.