STEPPING INTO Isaac Layman's Wallingford house is a bit like entering a Wonderland-in-reverse. You arrive, bearing in mind the enormous hyper-crystalline Layman photographs you've seen in museums or galleries: images of his oven, his kitchen sink, his tool bench and other household items.

And there, lined up like a "greatest hits" of domesticity, they all are!

Problem is: They couldn't, in context, look more unassuming or ordinary.

Layman's gift, in part, is in making the mundane look monumental and in imbuing unimpressive sights — an ice-cube tray, an accumulation of used Kleenex — with strangely universal meanings. His work is improbably palatial in feel. Yet for the past 10 years, he has restricted his photographic gaze almost entirely to the quarters he shares with his wife and two children.

What we have here is an artist who's a homebody on the grandest of scales.

Layman's exhibit of new work, "Paradise," at the Frye Art Museum through Jan. 22, contains one piece that's a single-exposure photograph: a vast close-up of an empty ice-cube receptacle in a red ice-cube tray. But that's a rarity for him. Most of his images are composites of multiple shots — sometimes dozens of them — "knitted" together on the computer using Photoshop to let the viewer see what the naked eye can't.

Take "Cabinet," from 2009, one of Layman's best-known works. It shows a kitchen cabinet surrealistically crammed with glassware. It's instantly recognizable. But there's also something "off" about it. For one thing, what kind of lunatic needs that much glassware? Then comes the odd realization that you're able to see both the tops and bottoms of the shelves on which the glassware is resting.

"Cabinet," in fact, is a Photoshopped compilation of dozens of scans that Layman made. Each of the 12 recesses in the cabinet — filled with the same set of glasses over and over again — has its own focal point. The white wood frame around the cabinet is the product of 18 scans. And that's just the start.

The rows of transparent glasses are, oddly, as crisply focused in back as they are in front. That's because they, too, are the result of multiple scans, made at different depths of field and layered over one another.

Gradually, it dawns on you that "Cabinet" was a huge undertaking. Indeed, it took Layman a month to create it.

Why put such effort into a sight so simple?

Layman argues that people think they know what their drinking glasses look like, when, in fact, they don't. In photographing such workaday items this way, he says, "They actually end up looking different."

In "Cabinet," he adds, all the points-of-view want to be known at the same time. You'd think the result would bristle with visual tension. Instead, it's oddly seamless, unsettling only on a subtle level.

"The eye wants to believe," Layman explains. "It's remarkable all the disparate photographs you can put together and have them work as a vision."

"I DIDN'T SET OUT to do this," Layman remarks as he gestures around the living quarters he's photographed so meticulously. "But I found myself searching through what I've got here, to address some fascination with life — or need from life."

Layman, who grew up in Clinton on Whidbey Island, was interested in ceramics in high school. But he frequently played hooky and missed the day to sign up for a ceramics class.

"So I was stuck with photography," he recalls. "It was the only thing that had an opening."

Getting stuck with photography, he adds with a twist of mind that's typical of him, "was a really good way to start, instead of falling in love with it and wanting to do it more . . . I also was seeing the curious ways it fails."

After graduating from high school in 1996, he got the travel bug and made an extended trip to Africa, primarily Botswana. He later made bike trips down the West Coast to San Francisco and, again, in Africa.

After his first African trip, he enrolled at Seattle Central Community College. By late 1999, he had moved on to the University of Washington where he studied with digital-photography pioneer Paul Berger. He married Camilla Lindsay, a fellow Whidbey Islander, in 2002. By that time his work had turned its focus inward toward home.

Now 34, he's got an energy and a build that's still boyish, but there's also something haunted or even a little bruised about him. In conversation, he's nervous. Almost every time he wants to say something, he'll make four or five false starts before suddenly coming up with a contradiction-filled statement that makes you feel you're in the presence of a mind unlike any other — a mind that's always reversing itself, always restating its intentions.

He'll startle you, for instance, by describing wedding photography (something he used to do) as being "pretty close" to travel and war photography. He immediately clarifies this by adding, "You take a lot of images and then you select those five good ones."

Then he registers his fundamental impatience with this way of working, declaring that it's "rife with self-congratulatory storytelling. If I take 10 photographs of myself and then send you one, I will pick the good one because that's the way I like to think of me."

That one decision can be magnificent, he concedes. "But because of how fast it happens, it will let you escape before you have to stay and deal with it."

The scan-back camera and other equipment Layman now uses for his largest pieces slow his work habits to a snail's pace and rule out much of the choice that comes into play with more conventional photography. The subject matter, camera angle and lighting are all strictly established beforehand, and once he starts scanning they can't be altered. The scans take 15 to 20 minutes apiece.

"It's just horrible," Layman says with a humorous solemnity. "It's kind of the worst. I would rather be watching a movie with a car chase than doing this — except that . . . there's a moment where things change. A very uncomfortable moment. But things change, and then you just can't even put enough time into it."

BEYOND THE time he's taking and visual trickery he's performing, Layman is also grappling with the fabric of his life, bringing to it an outlook that's simultaneously ecstatic and bleak. In his shots of his fireplace, his sink and other household realities, he seems continually to teeter between the mundane and the menacing, the banal and the sublime.

"I'm doing this to make my life more interesting," he says. "Or I do this to continue to be interested in my life."

He adds disarmingly: "Where I live is a paradise. Where I live is a jail cell. And I mean both those statements, though they seem to contradict each other."

His quest seems to be as much philosophical as aesthetic: "Instead of 'Why am I here?' I'm often asking 'What's it like to be here?' And then what comes out is pretty difficult. Being here is pretty difficult."

Sylvia Wolf, director of the Henry Art Gallery where Layman's work has appeared in group shows, sees him as part of a lineage of "artists who have employed digital means that reflect on the medium itself, but also give us a whole new eye on reality."

She has vivid memories of walking with him through the Henry: "I felt I was standing next to a kind of human aperture — someone who understood all the physics, all the capacity of digital picture-taking, but with the soul of a humanist. . . . He's quite unlike any other artist I've spoken to who's using the same tools."

Berger, who taught Layman as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, believes Layman has latched onto "a kind of flexibility in the (photographic) medium that people don't often associate with it — because, in fact, the flexibility's in our heads."

When we look at objects, Berger adds, it's useful to remember that we're looking at them "with a particular three-pound gelatinous mass in the cranium" that has its own ways of processing the visual world.

Layman, he suggests, is keenly attuned to what that "gelatinous mass" is up to.

Because of the time it takes to make these photographs and because they have to be done in perfect quiet, Layman's work has, at times, caused considerable inconvenience to his family.

"It's incredibly intrusive," he admits. When he was working in his kitchen, for instance, the room was off-limits to his family for weeks. (Luckily, his wife's aunt lives next door and opened her house to them.)

Moreover, his projects put him on a night-owl schedule because any nearby movement affects the camera's action. The equipment is so sensitive that even the rumble of a fan or air-conditioner can impart a seismograph-like jitter to the lines of its scan.

"Because of that," he says, "I can't go do something else in the house . . . I'll push GO on the camera and then I'll wait around 16 minutes."

These constraints, as he sees it, have hidden advantages.

"It's hard to quickly enter and leave with what you want," Layman says. "You've got to hang around for a day."

The work is printed on an enormous ink-jet printer that occupies one whole wall of Isaac and Camilla's bedroom — the only spot in the house where it would fit. All the framing is done in their dining and living rooms, both mostly empty except for a small island of furniture in one corner of the living room.

Ask Layman about the possibility of having a studio outside his home and it's clear the idea is anathema to him. "I'd rather have my whole life almost as a workshop."

LATELY, LAYMAN'S art-making activities haven't disrupted the household routine quite so much. He's focusing on ever-smaller objects — those ice-cube trays, a caliper case, a stove-pot lid — which he takes up to his attic studio to shoot, usually working through the night while everyone else is asleep.

"Then I'll crash out," he says, "and have to sleep for half a day."

The Frye exhibit shows him creating images of humble items that aren't immediately recognizable. All but one of the pieces are untitled.

Layman explains his aversion to titles as he points to a shot of a heating vent. "I'm not going to call it 'Heating Vent' because, at this moment, 'heating vent' would be like the 30th thing it is instead of the first. So why push that one forward?"

Talking about these things, Layman admits, it's hard to sidestep definition. And definition is the last thing he's after. "I'm not looking for a conclusion or an explanation," he says. "But it's rewarding to pay attention to looking, instead of just receiving and letting go."

The longer he looks, the more he's able to make the commonplace objects around him "stand in as grand spectacular visions, when they aren't."

And yet, he argues, there's actually nothing so grand in life.

"What staying in the house initially did for me was that it didn't give me an easy out. I couldn't wait around and say: 'I'm going to go take pictures when I go travel.' I couldn't say: 'I'm going to wait to go to an important place to take a picture.' Or 'I'm going to wait to go to a difficult place to take a difficult photograph.' I'm just always here. And always here should be good enough."

Michael Upchurch is a Seattle Times staff writer. He can be reached at mupchurch@seattletimes.com. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.