Walking down a side street in northeast D.C., I escaped the dreary weather into the Conner Contemporary Art Gallery. As soon as I walked up the staircase I felt above the world of boarded-up houses and scrubby grass, wandering through a cavernous raw space adorned with contemporary art. It was like walking into another world, resplendent with photography, oil smeared on wood, a web of gilded tires, hills of cobalt sand, with me smack dab in the middle, fascinated in the midst of it all.

This is “Options 2009,” a biennial exhibition of the works of 13 artists from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, hosted by Conner Contemporary Art and organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. Selected from around 400 applicants, these artists showcased their talents by means of a wide variety of multimedia, such as painting, video, jewelry and sculpture. This diverse collection also evoked a variety of themes: love, both melancholy and hopeful, urban exploration, foreboding danger and adventures in wild landscapes.

Each piece was intriguing because there was some element of the fantastic present that imbued it with a sense of the extraordinary. Here in this urban neighborhood of the Northeast, in a gallery whose concrete walls were overlaid with an intricate pattern of rusting pipes, imagination flourishes with this show.

Jessica Braiterman of Beltsville, Md., perfectly captured this marriage of reality and fantasy with her piece Veneers. Constructed from scraps of found tires covered in imitation gold leaf, Veneers takes up the better part of an entire room, hundreds of golden shapes descending from the ceiling in an elaborate arrangement. Because they are hung with invisible monofilament and lit just so, the glowing tires appear to float, casting a labyrinth of shadows on the floor that seem to consume the viewer. For a moment, I felt transported, completely caught up in a tangled network of gold and light and shadow.

Another artist who effortlessly applied the intricacies of imagination to the everyday was Matthew Smith of Washington, D.C. Smith’s medium of choice is photography, which he combines with text to create a story outside of the simple objects portrayed in his pictures. His Series 3 juxtaposes two copies of the same photograph — stark pictures of a sewing machine on a stool, a towel hanging in a bathroom, an empty plate — one of which has the crucial object missing. In its place, Smith has composed a snippet of a story arranged in the shape of the negative space left by the object. Thus, Smith shows the viewer that each ordinary object can tell a story that lends it a deeper significance. For example, the empty plate has been replaced by a short vignette about a man awaiting the return of his lover. In a meandering stream of consciousness, the speaker tells us, “I miss you like crazy,” makes plans to meet for “brunch and Bloody Marys” and describes the excitement he felt upon seeing “this great coffee table at Reincarnations that I think would be perfect.” Upon reading this tiny slice of thought, the subjects of Smith’s photograph are transformed from objects to symbols, weaving a story where once there was merely a plate or a sewing machine,or a forlorn towel.

Ding Ren, another native of Washington, D.C., also used her camera to focus on the seemingly mundane. However, a closer look reveals that her subjects are not so ordinary, and thereby creates a new viewpoint within her audience. In the photography compilation Take A Picture Of Every Red Dot That You See, Ren collected images of various scenery, all of which contained a different representation of a red circle. Some were obvious — for example, a simple photo of a large red soccer ball — while in others, the red dots were part of the larger composition, such as markers on a German street map or a spilled can of red paint. Each photo challenged the viewer to identify the red dot and then step back and place it within a greater creative context.

By presenting its audience with multimedia portrayals of fantastical reality, “Options 2009” certainly does challenge its viewers. Its contemporary urban artists ask us to take a look at our surroundings, even the drab landscape of Florida Avenue, and see them in a new light: that of our imaginations.