The Arvada Center art galleries have long been a dependable place to see the best in Colorado art. But they’ve never been easy to program cohesively. Visiting the center to see the painters, sculptors, photographers and other artists who define our era can feel like an obstacle course — up steps, through corridors and past the classrooms, box office, studios and offices that accommodate the other activities the center has long supported.

The first-floor gallery is confusing enough with its varying ceiling heights and tomb-like layout. Things get really tough on the two upper-level spaces where art on the walls competes with everything from exit signs to bathroom doors. Medals should go to the curatorial and installation teams, long led by Collin Parson, for not just persevering but for also moving forward unflinchingly on this mission of bringing fine art to the suburbs.

They succeed particularly well this summer, with a trio of shows that stare down the spatial obstacles and come together through related themes. Each exhibit is separate but they all go down a similar path, presenting work by artists, mostly narrative painters, who play with the concept of time, putting deep historical references in their scenes and purposely confusing then and now to challenge concepts of fact, fiction and memory.

The main attraction is a sprawling, mid-career retrospective of artist and teacher Melissa Furness titled “Embedded.” Furness is a master of painting the complexities of time, creating rich, complicated tableaux with multiple references to art history movements. She makes landscapes, still lifes, portraits and contemporary installations, often combining ideas from each of those categories into single objects. It’s deep and serious work at every turn, and the show provides rich escape.Furness’s best-known paintings focus largely on botanicals — wild, psychedelic arrangements of flowers, leaves and vines rendered in oil and acrylic. Her scenes take on the aura of abandoned or overgrown places full of mystery. It is hard to tell background from foreground, to know if each place is thriving or decaying.

In that sense, they question how things are recorded and ranked over time, and they explore the state of the planet and how we treat it — there is that much in each of her works.

The show includes hundreds of objects, all thoughtfully installed, and widens our understanding of Furness’s subject matter. We do see, through more than a decade of art-making, how the painter brings the same mystique to domestic scenes, to ideas of food consumption and nourishment, to sacred rituals. The paintings can be daunting to decipher, but that is where the magic is. Who dominates the imagery in each scene? Whose story is the painting telling? What is true and false?

The exhibit also gives Furness a platform to show her output beyond the brushwork that many people here know. There are deep dives into project-based pieces, produced in such diverse places as China and Mexico, that capture her ideas on history, the environment and folklore. Visitors can watch videos or download audio recordings using QR codes.

“Embedded” presents an artist, hard-at-work, tireless, with significant accomplishments behind her and plenty yet to come. That is what a mid-career retrospective is supposed to accomplish.

“Embedded” sets the scene for the two other exhibits, all running through Aug. 24. “Origin Stories” is a small-ish solo by Fort Collins artist Haley Hasler, who also blurs the line between past and present with a series of mythology-inspired portraits that have a distinct contemporary edge.

Hasler paints both herself and her friends and family into scenes built around goddess-like figures captured in deep nature. The subjects are largely female, draped in flowing garments and set among trees, wildlife, rainbows and flowers. They are a little on the hippie side, but rooted in ideas of domesticity and parenthood, and within that, power, innocence and vulnerability.

The paintings speak for themselves, though the show is built out into three-dimensional form with what appears to be a sort of re-creation of Hasler’s work studio, complete with an easel and a painting in progress. The show is also enhanced by the inclusion of costumes, made for the models who star in Hasler’s fantasy scenes, set up on headless mannequins. Some people will like this trick — it’s a peek into process — while others will find it ruins the ruse by turning the attention off the final product and onto the artist herself.

Finally, there is “Past is Present is Past is Present,” a group show with a confusing title that sets it up perfectly as a showcase for intriguing work from seven regional painters, all of whom play freely with chronology. Again, there is a heavy influence of mythology, folklore, surrealism and fantasy.

Many of the names are familiar here, too: Robin Hextrum, Tony Ortega, Diego Rodriguez-Warner, Tsogo Mijid and the duo of Sherry Wiggins and Luís Branco. They are, no doubt, a diverse lot, though pulling them together into this display highlights a spiritual, metaphysical side of their output that is not always obvious in solo shows.

The wall text for “Past is Present is Past is Present” tells visitors that these artists’ work evokes “how history informs identity, how cultural memory is preserved and transformed, and how contemporary creativity reimagines inherited traditions.” It’s well-put.

Though, to be honest, those words could apply to all three of the exhibits concurrently on display at this sprawling community building. That’s something of a triumph, really — linking these meandering gallery spaces together for a trio of attractions that build upon one another. It’s not easy to do at the Arvada Center.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.