THE VALLEY

Laura Lasworth has both pared down and stepped up her alienated figures in spare interiors of last year. She’s exchanged an expressionistic style for unique, interesting figures that are part stick people, part skeleton. The figures act out existential dramas in perspectively warped, stage-like rooms, where dramatic light and eerie fixtures are protagonists. Try as you may, you never unravel any serial logic to Lasworth’s strange, highly personal stories; the sometimes visionary, sometimes comical, isolated props and acid colors just give you a feeling of a lonely quest to see “inside” of things.

Mike Lloyd shows paintings that record travels to mountainous wildernesses and seaside resorts. The works convey a certain reverence for nature but they fall short formally. Paint is applied unmodulated and flat (sand is unequivocally pink, skies unequivocally turquoise); realism ranges from loose and sketchy to tight and detailed with little consistency. In “Oregon Coast,” Lloyd starts to achieve a sense of subtlety and atmosphere generally missing in this work. (Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to Jan. 25).