BEVERLY HILLS

Jack Reilly is usually known for his mixed-media wall reliefs, where overlapping, asymmetrical shapes in various metallic finishes are juxtaposed with rainbow-colored calligraphies. The latter are traced like random filigrees over the basic structural geometry, playing with space, composition and kinaesthetics in a ritual orgy of glitz.

In his new work, Reilly has taken the calligraphy to its logical conclusion, creating actual words that make literal and linguistic allusions to such abstract/cosmological notions as “Ambiguity,” “The Word” and “Time.” Reilly reinforces the visual metaphor by creating a viewer-activated, electronic tape loop for each piece, fusing synthesizer, human voice and musique concrete in an open-textured ambient drone.

Unfortunately, the abstraction of Reilly’s initial concepts is undermined by the heavy-handed, literal execution. The metallic shapes, with their hard-edge suggestions of arrows, shields and wings, conjure up images of international corporate logos, high-tech paeans to the military-industrial complex. Reilly’s offsetting linguistic metaphors and accompanying “sound tracks” seem to be an attempt to humanize and dislocate the ideological dominance of this motif, but ultimately he is merely constructing artificial (not to mention commercially opportune) windmills in order to quixotically tilt at them. (Stella Polaris Gallery, 445 S. Beverly Drive, to Oct. 12.)