At first glance, there does not seem to be much overlap between the art of Anna Kaye and Sarah McKenzie, two Colorado artists having solo exhibitions in Denver at this moment.

Kaye’s “Finding Light,” at the Denver Botanic Gardens, showcases her scenes of the great outdoors in an era of alarming wildfires. She draws with charcoal, one of the most ancient artistic tools, monochromatic pictures of the natural, forested landscape as it burns.

McKenzie’s views are almost entirely from the interior of institutional buildings. For “Displays of Power,” at David B. Smith Gallery, she paints with oil and acrylics, using a more present-day media to render richly-colored, tightly-framed images focusing on the architectural details of museums and prisons — and their surprising similarities.

Yet, the two artists stand together in ways that matter. They both dwell in the world of hyper-realism, a painting style that is anything but in vogue in the current age, and something not frequently spotlighted at such serious art galleries. They succeed by boldly going their own way, largely forgoing personal opinion in their compositions in favor of capturing their surroundings as they actually exist.

And within that restraint, that stepping back that other artists reject in favor of expressing ego, their work turns out to say plenty. Let the real world speak for itself, these works tell us, and the message has the volume of a loud scream.

Kaye’s pictures focus on wildfires and the devastation they cause to the natural environment, though the work has a cagey duality to it. With great precision, she captures fire in action, the swirl and flicker of flames as they relentlessly engulf all branches and brush in their way. Her work can resemble black-and-white photos of feared infernos as they rage.

With her charcoal, an apt medium for this subject matter, she makes detailed images of trees and stumps, caught in the fire’s path, that have been reduced to the blackened lifeless refuse of nature.

Kaye takes us through this darkness, but then she leads us to light. Fires, her work reminds us, are also rejuvenating. They open up forest floors to sunlight allowing new plants to grow. They expose insects that provide food for the animals that later return.

She shows off this capacity for resurrection gloriously, perching upon skeletal twigs regal birds, like screech owls and red-tailed hawks. There might be a butterfly flittering about barren aspen trunks. The wildlife is presented majestically, standing proud, like human royals returned to their positions after a failed revolution. These pictures can have the feel of both formal portraiture and, because of their accuracy, scientific drawings documenting local animal species.

The portrait aspect of these drawings can make them feel a bit forced, especially when the bird drawings are in the same room as Kaye’s photorealistic pictures of fires in action. I’m not sure, from a curatorial point of view, that the real-life and the seemingly-posed scenes ought to be within sight lines of each other.

But they do come together to make a point: Nature has its own cycles, and finds a way to survive. No doubt, climate change threatens to muck it all up, disturbing patterns that have existed for centuries. But there is good reason to keep the faith in our planet and to feel hope even in times of terror.

There is equal urgency — though, I have to say, less hope — in McKenzie’s exacting renderings of prisons and museums. There is more of a sense that we are powerless in the face of the monstrous, modern buildings in our landscape, even though we design and construct them ourselves and, in case of jails and galleries, for seemingly opposite purposes.

McKenzie blows that idea into oblivion in this exhibit, and it is devastating in its own way.

“Displays of Power” actually combines examples of two separate series that McKenzie has produced over the past few years. The first includes her large-scale paintings sourced from personal visits to both active incarceration facilities, like Sterling Correctional, Colorado’s largest men’s prison, and historic sites, like Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.

The second series is her follow-up work documenting the architecture of major art institutions, like New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

With the examples of paintings from the two series nimbly mingled together, we can see how one thing led to another in McKenzie’s mind. She brutally points out the commonalities of both types of buildings.

There are the obvious physical connections, and they are presented in almost photo-realistic form. Both have, as the artist says in her statement, “a predilection for minimalist, stripped-down spaces bound by poured concrete, a heavy reliance on the grid as a spatial principle.”

But they also use those architectural elements to impact the behavior of the humans inside them. That ranges from how the structures get navigated by people passing through to how much those inhabitants are manipulated into ceding psychological authority to the people who control the programming of such places.

There is something shocking, almost rude, about comparing the aims of wardens and guards to those of curators and artists, but McKenzie has her reasons. They all exploit design to get their way.

She lays out this thesis without naming names. Neither her prisons nor her museums have people on view or obvious signage. It’s just walls, doors, windows, iron bars, cells, solitary conferment rooms — and the occasional piece of art, which works to great effect in demonstrating how one may actually exist in these places, what they are instructed that they can and cannot touch, the freedoms they can and cannot feel.

And the work asks us to think bigger, not just about jails or exhibition spaces (though there is so much fodder there). It also questions the way architecture contributes to the larger narratives we build around history, its power to elevate one perspective or person over another. Architects, administrators and gatekeepers of design could learn much from this show about the clout they wield over the rest of us.

I suppose there is at least that kind of hope in this exhibition, the kind we like to believe comes from speaking truth to power. Though this exhibit does not feel like a protest march; it is more of an empirical, carefully controlled social study whose conclusions are impossible to dispute.

McKenzie’s work can feel quite cold and scientific in that way, but again, the work is less about elevating personal perspective and just letting the facts speak — or shout — for themselves. She knows what she is doing.

There is a hidden power in all of this hyper-realism. Sarah McKenzie, through her paintings, and Ann Kaye, through her drawings, understand and harness it to great effect. They stand in different postures, and take different positions, but they stand, as artists, very tall.