LA CIENEGA AREA

Carroll Dunham’s first Los Angeles solo show introduces her as an expressionist who straddles popular culture and nature. Using eye-popping colors and a brash style that recalls comic-book illustration, she paints cascades of rings, root-like organic forms, splashes and rings of water on large wood panels. The oddity of this aesthetic coupling is reinforced by the underlying natural beauty of supports in such woods as walnut, cherry, zebrano and maple.

Collage-style images and black, calligraphic gestures spill over patchwork wood backings. When Dunham obliterates the original grain and knots of wood by painting them--brightly and broadly--you can’t be sure if she is celebrating nature through a vernacular sensibility or commenting ironically on its trashing. Either way, her paintings exude none of the limp exhaustion we have come to associate with Neo-Expressionism. Disjointedness seems to be a natural outgrowth of youthful energy and encyclopedic interest.

The mood changes in a gallery of drawings, worked in black-and-white media on wood veneers. Here, Dunham waxes quite elegant as she trails quivering lines and fashions meandering shapes that suggest layers of growth and radiating movement in nature. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Feb. 16.)