Aldrich is such a natural at fakery

The humor in Lynn Aldrich’s new work is real. All else is fake -- or, at least, not what it pretends to be. Plastic tubing mimics the spray of water. Fabric swatches conjure animal pelts. And in the most magnificent, playful, tragicomic work in her deeply amusing show at Carl Berg, kitchen sponges and scrubbers of all sorts stand in for the teeming aquatic life of a coral reef.

Aldrich calls the exhibition “All Nature Sings,” borrowing a snippet from a Protestant hymn celebrating creation: “This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.” As in the hymn, Aldrich praises the bounty and ingenuity of creation but she couches her earnestness in clever parody. Real concerns masquerade as synthetic follies.

How to sustain a relationship with the authentic -- how, for starters, to even recognize it -- from within a culture that favors artifice, idealized strength and beauty, external appearances over inner truths?

Aldrich tickles rather than tackles this question in her work, a consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition. She uses pristine commercial products (from rain gutters to toilet plungers) as the raw materials of her art. It’s canny work, eliciting immediate smiles and lasting, poignant sighs.

For “Starting Over: Neo-Atlantis,” the remarkable coral reef piece, Aldrich constructs an aquatic wonderland, nearly 8 feet across, out of cleaning supplies. Brightly colored plastic handles protrude perkily from a surface barnacled in musty green and gleaming blue scouring pads. The mint green fingers of rubber gloves poke upward and the floppy green strands of a mop droop downward like the tendrils of sea anemones. Fat rectangular scrubbers are joined together to form a sea star. Two-toned sponges, folded, suggest slightly cracked, clam-like mouths.

The chromatic range of the brushes, sponges and scrubbers rivals the brilliancy of underwater life. Credit Aldrich with assigning an alternate use for cleaning tools whose sprightly colors (lime, silver, copper, hot pink, lavender, magenta, lemon and more) defy the drudgery with which they’re usually associated.

The artifice is overwhelming, verging on garish, yet the whole is perversely beautiful, a resourceful, synthetic substitute for the real thing. But what about the real thing? We’ve paved paradise, and Aldrich’s surrogate offers an outrageous, satiric, hyperbolic reminder of what our physical and psychic landscapes have come to as a result.

The L.A.-based artist has been using domestic products in and as her work for several years. She’s been especially prolific with the common garden hose. “Drench,” her hose construction here, is delightfully concise yet rich in association. “Drench” hangs on the wall like a painting, specifically an abstract stripe painting, only the vertical ribbons of color are not pigment on canvas but densely aligned 2-foot lengths of hose in an array of blues and greens.

Some of the hoses are capped in copper, some have webbed reinforcement beneath their luminous skins, and some are tinted plastic tubes slimmer than the garden variety. Their literal identity remains intact, but Aldrich has also extended it, turning the hoses into a suggestion of the water they carry, as well as accepting them as pure color and line.

The only work that doesn’t succeed in extracting this kind of fertile multiplicity from ordinary objects is “Designer’s Choice: The Naming of the Animals.” Created over the last 10 years, “Designer’s Choice” spreads across the gallery floor like a mosaic rug. Each foam square bears a fabric swatch imitating an animal pelt or amphibian skin, sometimes in shimmery metallic or wildly synthetic colors. The work gives a nod to Carl Andre’s floor pieces (just as “Drench” pays witty homage to Minimalist painting), but it lies flat and conceptually stays flat.

Aldrich’s other agglomerations and alterations pack a more impressive punch, a cartoon-like pow. They resonate powerfully -- and whimsically -- with both natural and unnatural worlds, the domestic sphere and global trauma. Literally and figuratively, they clean up.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Feb. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.carlberggallery.com

A hand in shaping the landscape

Satoru Hoshino’s ceramic sculptures at Frank Lloyd are part vessel, part landscape and entirely stunning. Each is made from a thick cylinder of clay, coiled to form a rough cone, narrow at its base and widening as it rises. Hoshino has pressed deeply into the coiled ropes of clay at more or less regular intervals, imposing rhythmic concave beats. The indentations give the walls of the sculptures the craggy feel of porous stone.

Hoshino’s nuanced, graceful glazing counters the muscular process of shaping the clay. In the most spectacular works, milky white seeps over a skin of cool and dark earthen greens, suggestive of jade underwater or emerald lichen in shadow. The fluid, bluish white glaze pools in the depressions, both inside and out. Streams, waterfalls and melting snow come to mind (the artist calls the series “Spring Snow”) as well as a preternatural sense of abundance -- the empty cup running over.

Hoshino, based in Shiga, Japan, leaves a bit of unglazed clay exposed at the bottom of each work and leaves the blunt end of the spiral evident up top. Both moves intensify the sculptures’ air of immediacy, of raw organic matter worked by a reverent hand, of primal forces in concert. Liquid color flows over the dense, kneaded clay; the hand’s push plays against gravity’s pull; intention dances with chance. The forms are complete, but the processes they evoke are never-ending.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Feb. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.franklloyd .com

Into a realm of enchantment

Only one lovely drawing in the current Farmlab show is titled “Enchanted Forest,” but an air of enchantment permeates the exhibition’s entire premise: Last year, a London-based family of four was invited by a nonprofit organization to a Mediterranean island to mine the creative ramifications of the notion of “journey.”

Sculptures, drawings, paintings and videos generated by the experience make up the show “Crystal Ship.” It features the work of parents and children Felicity Powell, Ansel Krut, Saskia Krut-Powell and Hannah Krut-Powell, but individual attribution is downplayed in favor of collective exploration.

Seven short videos that run continuously in the center of the gallery establish an engrossing atmosphere that melds free-associative play and meditative wonder. Each ruminates on a physical or sensory phenomenon: the play of light on water; the movement of a veiled body underwater; a luminous, phantom-like ship in the night. One stop-action video tracks the evolution of small wax relief sculptures on the dark backs of round mirrors, eight of which are displayed in the gallery. Exquisitely crafted in milky, translucent wax, the images read as bizarre cameos whose profiles sprout roots and branches or sinuous tentacles.

The videos and wax reliefs alone make this an absorbing show. Two series of paintings are less compelling, one a frothy set on canvas featuring bananas and sausages and the other, in black paint on glass, more mysterious but not well-enough developed. A charming inner sanctum, built of cardboard boxes and entered through a child-sized opening, extends the show’s feeling of magic and discovery with its illuminated niches filled with little sculpted scenarios involving mostly pets and sweets.

Farmlab, 1745 N. Spring St., Unit 4, L.A., (323) 226-1158, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.farmlab .org

Time outpaces the U.S. in Iraq

Dan Bayles’ paintings of the new U.S. Embassy buildings in Baghdad have something in common with other aspects of our engagement in Iraq: The designs are compelling on paper but far from tenable on the ground. Perfectly acceptable for art, not such a good idea in politics.

Bayles, a recent MFA grad from UC Irvine, paints the structures of the 104-acre compound (whose completion continues to be delayed) as “New Ruins.” The buildings are on their way up and on their way down at once. They are simultaneously becoming and eroding.

Bayles has a marvelously adept manner of evoking this dual state of generation and decay. He builds each image out of different modes of representation -- schematic, realistic, photographic -- and creates a sense of space that is convincing and yet uncertain. Painted fragments of walls abut structures risen from photographs of weathered wood or distressed stone that are cut into small tiles and collaged onto the surface to look like brickwork. Painted patches of green scattered about the grounds of the pool house and other structures read as landscaping but have the fluttery indeterminacy of torn-paper collage.

Surface textures throughout are discontinuous. What appear to be strips of tape crisscross the canvases and are painted over, adding to the feeling of a provisional materiality, equal parts intention and debris.

What Bayles has done in this engrossing series is visualize the architecture of entropy.

Chung King Project, 945 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 625-1802, through Jan. 26. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com