There’s a festive exhibit at Wita Gardiner...

There’s a festive exhibit at Wita Gardiner Gallery (535 4th Ave.). It’s especially appropriate for the holiday season, but the works by 17 artists would be welcome gifts any time of the year.

The theme, “Interior: The Home--Exterior: The Landscape,” covers just about everything. In fact, the show ranges from an installation to jewelry displays.

The installation is by ubiquitous sculptor Mario Lara. Ironically, while he was constructing it in the gallery, workers were removing his aesthetically successful piece from Horton Plaza.

The installation is an ambiguous work of art. It looks playful--a high lavender and yellow wood fence blocking the view into the gallery filled with treasures. It has the feel of a fun-house mystery maze that you have to work through to get to the magical kingdom. At one end is a door-size opening crossed by a large red “X” blocking passage. (Visitors walk around the wall to enter the exhibit spaces.) It’s a conventional sign for “No Trespassing,” but in this context it could as well mean a big kiss for Xmas.

Lara’s title for the piece, “Landscapes of Fear,” seems totally off the wall. There is nothing in the work to suggest “the almost infinite manifestations of the forces for chaos, natural and human” cited in the artist’s statement.

If an ominous piece was his intent, he surely failed to realize it. But he succeeded, despite himself, in making an engaging entrance. He should change the name.

Beyond Lara’s installation is a visually rich show of works of high quality in a big area filled with light.

The best-known artist represented is Los Angeles sculptor Roland Reiss, who has for a long time specialized in making miniature, mixed-media environments of extraordinary verisimilitude. There is usually a psychological contradiction in their implied narrative content, however, as in two works here, “Dancing Lesson: Unfinished Business” and “Dancing Lesson: Victory Over Need.”

Therman Statom uses glass in a playful fashion, decorating a pink stepladder with brightly colored shards or constructing a small house or a life-size chair of glass. His works evince the upbeat presence of Los Angeles glitz.

Photographer Philipp Scholz Ritterman is known for his muscularly elegant, black-and-white photographs of urban and industrial scenes at night. Here, however, he is represented by wildly playful, long-exposure photographs--trees under a freeway, for example. The humor is an unexpected turn for an artist whose works have generally been very serious.

Also included are ceramic works by Stephanie DeLange, Thom Hatton, Sandy Brown and Michael Lamar; paper sculptures by Hollis Litrownik and jewelry by David Tisdale, Jeannie Keefer Bell and Robert McCall.

The show continues through Jan. 10.

The Circle Gallery in Old Town (2501 San Diego Ave.) is celebrating the 94th birthday of internationally known designer Erte with an exhibition of 45 prints, mostly serigraphs, and 50 pieces of jewelry.

The artist was fortunate to find a style in the 1920s that was compatible with his need for self-expression, and he has used it ever since.

His technically accomplished and engagingly decorative works are very feminine in an old-fashioned, pre-women’s-liberation way, with a decadent but harmlessly erotic character.

They are the kind of works you hate to love.

The exhibit continues through Tuesday.