LA CIENEGA AREA

Funny about names. There is a sculptor named Wood who sculpts in wood and now there is one named Timothy Woodman who tinkers in aluminum. Serendipitous association with Oz’s Tin Woodman is inescapable.

Anyway, he makes little riveted painted relief figures of great charm and skill. Everybody in them is up to some highly symbolic human activity whether it be a sailor in a rain slicker throwing out an anchor or a chap trying to prevent a skeleton from escaping from the closet.

Some 15 works are irritatingly modish in the accents of Post-Modernism and therefore liable to attract overly fancy interpretation. It is possible to see them as part of a current image-as-language game since each tends to call up verbal associations.

Most of these, like many of Woodman’s compositions, swirl chaotically around the the idea of people coping with difficult situations in a way that leans to the heroic. Sometimes the heroism is as quotidian and humorous as a man braving the maws of a closing elevator door, sometimes as epic as Moby Dick demolishing a whaling boat.

Woodman’s everyday scenes are flavored with Pop style, a bloodhound hunt for a lost child harks back to American Regionalism, a swashbuckling duel is classic Romanticism filtered through Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It boils down to a kind of Neo-Narrative art that Woodman makes clever, sweet, shy and a little too entertaining. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to March 8.)