HOLLYWOOD AREA

L.A. artist Jeff Price holds a busy show of two dozen large sculptures, paintings and drawings that run around pushing every doorbell of the Primal Post-Mod persuasion in the hope the portals of perception will swing open.

“Small Monument to Tennessee Williams” updates early Dada when it liked to enshrine fecal lumps. He paints a set of double comma-shapes like De Kooning breasts. “Chine” suspends a lump of bronze that also does service as a flayed torso.

Individual works often succeed on their own terms. There is something haunting and mordant about the literalist abstraction of “Corazon” with its truncated aorta. Lava-like hunks of pendulous bronze touch pre-conscious memory. But the disturbing fitfulness of the ensemble testifies that this is still an art in search of itself. (Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 31.)