Nina Bovasso knows her drawings are pretty. The bright colors and decorative elements have prompted critics to label her work “girlish” or “feminine” — and tagged as “sophisticated doodling.”

And it’s true that the groovy flower heads and wavy-gravy rainbows are reminiscent of an adolescent’s scribbles in a notebook. But there’s another current running underneath. “There’s a hyper giddiness that’s a bit sinister,” Ms. Bovasso said. “I want it to be beautiful, but it’s meant to seduce you to look deeper.”

An exhibit of Ms. Bovasso’s new work opens at BravinLee programs on Thursday. The title of her show, “Botanizing on the Asphalt,” is borrowed from a book of essays on wanderlust and walking. The phrase was used to describe people fraternizing on city streets by comparing the human interaction to plant life, as it blossoms and blows about.

“When I read that, I thought, ‘Walking. That’s where it’s at,'” Ms. Bovasso said.

It’s an understandable reaction for a New Yorker who has landed in a car-centric college town; Ms. Bovasso is in the middle of a yearlong stint as an artist in residence at University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.

“I don’t drive, and I hate car culture. If you don’t own a car, they think you’ve D.U.I’d,” Ms. Bovasso said. “Whenever you are away from your environment, a certain amount of reflection takes place.”

Her current work looks like a dreamlike garden — one fueled by thoughts of New York City, her youth, and botanical metamorphosis run amok. Bursts of tangerine, pink, and bright red flowers swirl across dense layers of enlarged petals, shoots of leaves, dots, and rainbows. The day-glo colors and flower-power daisies, as well as bold black lines, seem straight out of the 1970s. It was a decade in which Ms. Bovasso, 41, was growing up in Manhattan’s Kip’s Bay neighborhood and spent time watching her mother — a textile artist — convert designs into graphic patterns for the apparel industry.

Today she maintains an apartment in the East Village, but her nomadic life as an art student has taken her to Bard College, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Princeton University Museum of Art, as well as several corporate collections. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2000, she has shown her work in solo exhibits in the U.S. and abroad.

As her reputation has grown and her artwork has evolved, the appropriation of graphic designs and motifs has remained a constant. “Unlike my mother, who can do anything, I tried to do textile design, but I was terrible at it,” Ms. Bovasso said. “So I decided to take the regimen of pattern — and defy it.”

Early in her career, Ms. Bovasso appropriated the graphic iconography of the cartoon world, most notably, the comic-strip character and ubiquitous commercial logo, Snoopy, which she multiplied obsessively across the paper. “Snoopy is a very democratic image,” Ms. Bovasso said. “Everyone drew Snoopy.” The hints of irrationality and mania in the Snoopy drawings reappear in most of Ms. Bovasso’s later work, although the addition of bright, cheerful colors distract, even disguise, the darker connotations of the decorative embellishments.

Cerebral and self-depreciating, Ms. Bovasso is resistant to providing easily digestible nuggets to explain her abstract flower drawings. She uses various acrylic mediums, watercolor, gouache, and ink, and a variety of finishes, matte, glossy, iridescent, fluorescent, “to keep the surface active.”

Her floral creations exceed their botanical imperatives and seem endlessly to send forth buds, blooms, and foliage, creating a kaleidoscope effect for the eye. “I call one of my drawings, ‘Her Name Was Lola,’ because it reminded me of a showgirl,” Ms. Bovasso said. The flowers’ ornamental appearance stimulates the eye’s yearning for harmony, but the ruptured patterning replaces order with turmoil. The drawing is spontaneous, intuitive, and unfettered by preparatory sketching. “I make it up as I go along,” she said.

As for her critics who have emphasized the feminine, Ms. Bovasso finds such reaction troubling —but not just for the suggestion of sexism. She wonders if people don’t trust their instinct “to just like it.” The pieces may be pretty and pleasing, but, the artist contends, they are not superficial: “My work, in a way, is confrontational — formally and visually.”

That confrontation may come in the form of hot pink flowers, but with them, Ms. Bovasso offers a precarious kind of harmony — nonlinear and somewhat evasive, like the artist herself.

January 11 to February 10 (526 W. 26th St., 212-462-4404).