Kilimnik’s oil on canvas, “Prince Charming”

Karen Kilimnik has roamed restlessly from medium to medium during the last 20 years, and, as such, it’s been difficult to assess snippets of her painting, photography, video and installations as an entire body of work.

The survey exhibition of her work on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art through Nov. 12, however, brings the whole picture into view. Her works, the product of an artist whose inner world is complete, are externalized only with simple materials. They might be more compelling if they were described in words, rather than experienced with the senses.

The term “technician” broadly defines visual artists, not because they do high-tech work, but because they manipulate and form materials. Those materials can be heavy and solid, like a massive public sculpture, or flitting and elusive, like virtual reality or a performance. In any case, there are formal decisions that are necessary to characterize works in any medium.

Kilimnik’s works barely manifest formal elements, or style, of any distinction. They give the overriding sensation that the artist is hiding in plain sight –– hiding amid the familiar, hiding in the copies and tracings of other representations, hiding among the generic objects she assembles, in the TV screen, in art history. Her art is an art of resembling. Tracing from a magazine is good enough; capturing video from a TV set is adequate; bad snapshots with the date and time on them are OK. It’s not that these techniques are excluded from artistic practice. It’s that Kilimnik’s efforts are less memorable than others working in a similar quicksilver manner.

The curatorial notes often refer to theater to describe what’s going on in Kilimnik’s works. But while theater provides a reference point, her work is more like program notes for theater than theater itself. Real theater can be cathartic, transporting. It can take you on a trip. Kilimnik’s art is the playbill, the headshots of stars, the autograph book carried backstage, the advertisements for fancy restaurants after the show. It’s Leonardo DiCaprio as a paper doll, a poster from Teen Beat magazine or notes in a girl’s diary. It’s pirates and The Avengers and supermodels, but all watered down.

Although the wistful quality of her drawings and paintings and the scattered assembly of props and photocopies in her installations are often linked with Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley and Jack Pierson, Kilimnik has none of Sherman’s intensity, none of Kelley’s risk and none of Pierson’s lyricism. It’s all low-energy and remarkably devoid of life.

A diluted romanticism pervades her works, and her tastes run more to Harlequin romance novels than Wuthering Heights. Kilimnik’s appropriation of British romantic painting offers many opportunities for art history buffs and curators to reveal the back story. In this case, a hearty subtext is a buttress for paintings that offer a paint-by-number palette and little passion beyond a dazed fascination. Just like “The Red Room in the Modern Architecture,” Kilimnik’s imitation salon-style period installation is a fancy hut for ho-hum art.

“The Bluebird in the Folly” — a video work installed in a gazebo with curtains, decorative lighting sconces and upholstered seats — is an oozy fantasy ballet that brings to mind Victorian-era photographs purporting to document the antics of woodland fairies. This moving image work alone, stripped of its stage-y installation, delivers the most memorable impressions. The fantasist Kilimnik is the most interesting. The repressed dreamer releases herself in a medium conducive to reverie. In this aspect of longing and repression, her sentiments and obsessions mirror those of the artist Joseph Cornell, whose collages ultimately were devotional in nature. He glorified the ballet and followed the lives and careers of specific ballerinas and actresses like a groupie under a spell. His shyness, stunted emotional development and pack-rat sensibility imprinted his work with a similar feeling of furtive longing pronounced in Kilimnik’s work.

The Interview magazine concept is analogous for Kilimnik’s endeavors. As the mass media vehicle for Warhol’s star-worshiping enterprise in the 1980s and ‘90s, Interview discovered, anointed and ascended to the pantheon of the glamorous and lovely aspiring actors and wannabes on the New York and Los Angeles scenes. Kilimnik’s video of giggling, panty-clad supermodels is a completely unironic, blissful adulation of that communally adored beauty. Her drawings are more satisfying than the other video works that exploit static snow and glitches to a neat pitch. The witty hand-scrawled texts reveal the eccentric digressions in the artist’s train of thought. The overall imagination at work is the most fascinating presence in the exhibition, and, yet, it always feels out of reach, like a recluse that won’t show its face. Perhaps the cultivation of this mystique is Kilimnik’s ultimate work.

Karen Kilimnik’s work will show through Nov. 12 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 770 N.E. 125th St., North Miami. For information, call 305-893-6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org.